George Gavutis, Jr. and Tommy Stubbs oral history transcript

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INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE GAVUTIS, JR. AND TOMMY STUBBS
BY THOMAS GOETTEL, AUGUST 30, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: Today is August 30, 2000 and we are in Kensington, New Hampshire
with George Gavutis. We are at George’s house and we’re also talking to Tommy
Stubbs. Tommy worked at Parker River for quite some time on the Maintenance staff?
MR. STUBBS: Yes, on the Maintenance staff.
MR. GOETTEL: He was the head of the Maintenance department. We thought we’d get
together here today and talk a bit about their careers with the Fish and Wildlife Service,
in the Division of Refuges. George, you are from right around this area aren’t you?
Aren’t you from New Hampshire?
MR. GAVUTIS: Massachusetts.
MR. GOETTEL: Lawrence, Massachusetts?
MR. GAVUTIS: Lowell.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, ok, Lowell, Mass. How did you get started with your career with
the Division of Refuges?
MR. GAVUTIS: I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in the back in the
late 1950s and 1960s and I got hired as a student assistant, which was a summer program
at Parker River. The manager of it was J. C. Apple at the time, and that’s when I met
Tom. And Woody Sears, and Harry Sears were all there then I believe. Tom was the
maintenance foreman, either then or thereafter at some point, and ran that part of the
program. I worked there for three summers, and went back to school in the fall. When I
graduated worked there during the fall, and then I went in the Military for a while.
MR. GOETTEL: In what branch?
MR. GAVUTIS: I went into the Army Reserves for six months. I was down at Fort Dix
for eight weeks of basic training, and then went to meetings on weekends and summers
for about eight years thereafter, because I jumped around a lot in the Army.
MR. GOETTEL: So, did you go to UMASS in wildlife, was what your major?
MR. GAVUTIS: Yes, Wildlife Management. I was under Professor Tripanzi, and Dr.
Sheldon, who was the woodcock person.
MR. GOETTEL: What a character!
MR. GAVUTIS: What a guy! And then, Fred Greeley, I believe took over up there. I
kept coming back to Parker River. J. C. Apple had me doing the cratering charge, you
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know, blowing potholes with Army. And then he tried to make the regional blasting
expert. In fact, I still have my Blaster’s Handbook, and all this. I went up to
Montezuma, which was my first assignment. We started mixing ammonium nitrate and
fuel oil, which is the cause of the demise of some buildings as you may recall recently out
in Kansas City [referring to Oklahoma City Federal Building]. My father used to talk
about the Texas City fire on the coast of Texas, when a big ship caught fire, and
exploded. It was like at atomic bomb had gone off down there. So when I was working
with this stuff, he was nervous. I was nervous too. We used blasting caps and detonating
cord, which you could wrap around a tree and cut the tree right off! We used that to blow
these potholes. We’d mix fifty pound bags, in plastic, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and
diesel fuel. Then we’d stick a blasting cap in, or “det cord” in and dig a hole and through
it in, and blow- holes. In the marsh, basically it was kind of a prelude to open marsh
water management. It was basically putting deep- water sumps in the upland edge, or the
high part of the marsh, where the mosquitos’ breed, and the minnows couldn’t get, except
during extreme tides, and they couldn’t stay there. They’d come out with the tides, and
couldn’t eat the mosquitoes. So that’s why the mosquito breeding was so bad.
We went over the Nelson’s Island.
MR. STUMP: We’ve got pictures of those.
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah, I’ve got all that.
MR. GOETELL: We just had a battery failure. So George you were talking about
blasting. Doing your blasting. Tommy, you mentioned having pictures. And there were
some narrative reports?
MR. GAVUTIS: There was actually a Cratering Charge Report filed, and I have that on
file. With the black and white photos of the geysers, and maybe some colored photos
too. If again, you can’t find it at the Refuge, or it isn’t available, I have all that stuff. I
have a lot of the narrative reports too.
MR. GOETTEL: I’ll look into the Narratives, because they are supposed to be archived.
So, if they are archived somewhere in the official government archives we’ll be all set.
Maybe we can at least take a copy of some of your other stuff. And maybe sometime this
winter when you’re looking through your memorabilia, and if you think of it, just set
some stuff aside, and I would be glad to make copies of it. We certainly don’t want to
take the original copies from you guys. Whatever, you’d like to see put in the archives.
Because that’s the type of stuff that will meant a lot. So much of the time we are always
reinventing the wheel, and so much of this stuff gets lost. You started talking George,
about going to the different stations, you were the regional blasting guy?
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: You went to a whole bunch of different stations?
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MR. GAVUTIS: J.C. Apple said, “you are a new employee, and the best way to fame
and fortune is to be an expert in something. You would get to see the whole region, I
think we should designate you the regional blasting expert”. I guess I knew as much
about ammonium nitrate as anybody, or more. The military came out with the crater
charges first, from Fort Dix. And they did them at Parker River during the first stage.
After that we just built our own components. We’d get heavy- duty plastic bags, and
you’d buy ammonium nitrate fertilizer at Agway, or wherever, I guess they had Agway
then. And then a certain proportion of diesel fuel was added. We used to stir it up. We
actually did it in the bags. They were very tough bags. I can’t remember what we’d use
for a paddle. We would pour the diesel fuel on the “pril” ammonium nitrate. It looked
like little beads, or circles. It would soak up the diesel in just the right proportion. It
would soak down through and as I recall, we either sloshed the bags around, or stirred it.
Then you insert a piece of the detonating cord or a blasting cap into the bag. Then you
just tied the end, or taped the bag shut. We’d dig a hole, two or three feet deep with a
posthole digger. Usually it was in organic soils, there in the marsh, so it was pretty easy
digging once you got through the sod. Then you’d bury this thing, and you’d do a whole
series of them. Then you would evacuate the area, and touch it off with a detonator,
electrically, or you’d light the detonating cord. I really was nervous about all of that!
Thinking that you could get blown up here you know! This was serious stuff! [laughing]
But it was very exciting and interesting and scary when that stuff went off! You wanted
to be well away. Chunks of mud, and pieces of clams shells, and rocks went way up in
the air. The narrative pictures, and that report that I did were replete with pictures of
these blasts, and the craters that resulted.
MR. STUBBS: We even got some aerial views.
MR. GAVUTIS: We had aerial views, like Tom said, that looked like a moonscape right
afterwards. But the stuff kind of melts down, and you end up with these fairly clean
looking areas.
MR. GOETTEL: It would be interesting to see what it looks like now from the air.
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah. We took pictures when I went back to Parker River as the
manager, many years later. We did a survey there. They were still there. You could see
the rings. They were on the latest aerials that the SCS would take every few years.
MR. STUBBS: But they had filled in some.
MR. GAVUTIS: They filled in depth wise. That happened pretty quickly, within a year
or two. Because the tides would come in and out, the debris around the edges kind of
melts down, and they may have been more that four feet. But they ended up around three
or four feet deep. But then they didn’t change. I was the manager in the early 1970s and
they were blasted in the early 1960s, around 1962, right around the time I was graduating
from the University of Massachusetts, before I went into the Army for a while. They had
already mellowed by then, and had re-vegetated. But the rings, the circles are still there.
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I don’t know how they are now. It’s been fifteen or twenty years since I was at Parker
River as the manager.
MR. GOETTEL: But they were there then?
MR. GUVATIS: Oh, they were. That was the interesting thing. It was kind of like
killing a fly with a sledgehammer, but the basic premise was to super-saturate the upland
edges to keep the mosquitoes from breeding, where the minnows can’t live and linger
long enough to control the population of mosquito larvae with these sumps and reservoirs
that will hold these minnows. And every time it rains hard or a tide seeps in a little bit,
they immediately go out from these reservoirs and then they can retreat back into them.
They aren’t picked off by birds, or stranded, or have to go back to sea, where ever they
have to go to keep up with the water, because they have a little sump there that they live
in.
MR. STUBBS: Now, was it done mostly for mosquitoes?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah. I always felt that it was. When we did it some of the marches,
we did it in dense areas. When we did it in Montezuma it was actually more for habitat
interspersion. Habit improvement, because we went into dense cattail stands. There was
some mosquito problem, but it was really to break up the marsh, and breeding ponds.
That’s a good question Tom. But at Parker River, it was. At least, I felt it was. Because I
studied the mosquitoes as part of my student assistant duties for the summer before we
did it. I logged, and basically marked all of the breeding spots with stakes. I remember
having lathe, or construction stakes. And we dug a hole underneath each one of those
stakes and blew a big hole. In some places there were like four or five in a row that
almost touched each other. And then there would be a big gap, because there would be
no breeding there. Then there would be one here, and one there. I could dig out those
photos, it wouldn’t take long, before you left today, although, my house is upside down
with the renovations here. So I shouldn’t say that. I know about where they are.
MR. GOETTEL: You say that it was overkill. But, these days we’ve got all of that ultra
low ground pressure equipment that you didn’t have back then. So it was probably the
best way to get the job done.
MR. GAVUTIS: We did other things, too. Tom had an “OC-6” and an “OC-3” at Parker
River with cleat tracks, old crawlers. They don’t even make that stuff any more. That
stuff could practically run over your foot in the marsh, and not hurt you. But, when I was
the manager there, with Bill Faller there as the biologist, we bought a backhoe unit for
that “OC-6”. The problem was that it didn’t have enough reach. It wasn’t a big enough
machine. The ones that they are using now are much bigger machines with some reach to
them. You can do the same thing with these very low ground pressure excavators now,
much faster. What are you talking about for a price tag on one of those things, a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars?
MR. STUPPS: One hundred and fifty, to two hundred thousand dollars.
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MR. GAVUTIS: So, still there still may be some application for the blasting technique.
I wrote up a paper on it. Like I said for this study. A report. And it went on. After that I
oversaw at Montezuma and Bombay Hook, and Brigantine, I did Brigantine too, off the
north dike at Brigantine. Mostly salt marsh stuff though, except for Montezuma. Then
other Refuges, more and more, picked up on it. It wasn’t that complicated a technique.
And they either had the National Guard, like up at Iroquois, and Great Meadows got into
it too.
MR. STUPPS: The reason why I think Parker River got into mosquito control was when
the land was taken, Fish and Wildlife Service went on record, saying that we would
contribute toward mosquito abatement.
MR. GUVATIS: We were committed.
MR.STUPPS: As a matter of fact, we used to buy DDT. I think we had one thousand
dollars, which was a lot of money back then, each year for DDT. We’d buy as many as
ten, fifty-five gallon barrels of 25% DDT. We would give it to the State and they would
aerial spray around the perimeter of the refuge.
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember the last time they did that. I was a student there. And
there was an encephalitis scare that year. It was in August or early September and they
sprayed. They weren’t supposed to spray in the impoundments but they did that year. In
fact, I don’t think we gave them that DDT. I think the Governor mobilized the National
Guard and everything else because there was such a health crisis. A couple of people had
died. So, they were going up in these big transport planes. They were big planes, I
remember seeing them, flying wing-to-wing, going right up Plum Island sound. But they
also sprayed the impoundment, so it killed all of the white perch. We had a big white
perch die off that year.
MR. STUPPS: I remember that year.
MR. GUVATIS: That was my recollection. I wasn’t in charge of the Refuge or anything
else then. I was just a student, but I reported on my findings. I remember that “J.C.”
[Apple] was pretty concerned or upset that they had sprayed the impoundment, and that
they hadn’t really talked to us, or got our permission, or coordinated the spraying of the
marsh. It was about the time that DDT banned. Rachel Carson’s studies were coming
out in her books and everything, and we had lost all of our ospreys and eagles nesting on
the east coast. So it was about that time that it shut down. I think it was 1960 or 1959 I
would guess, that I was there as a student. And that was probably the end of it, the end of
DDT. I am surprised that it went that long. When you think now, that wasn’t that long
ago. When you think of it, it was one hundred years ago when they sprayed 100% DDT,
and agent orange. When I was as Iroquois Refuge, which was my third assignment,
which would have made it in the mid 1960s, for a month, I sprayed agent orange on
boundaries with a pumper unit. I was in an old command car, just going along spraying
boundaries with agent orange. Then, a few years later, I was at another Refuge, and
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Larry Smith was still at Iroquois, everything refuge did it, it was what we did. When I
was at Parker River, they had me experimenting with bait. No, it wasn’t bait. It was
“urea ” soil sterilant that I was doing. They said the side effects would be equivalent to
taking an aspirin. You didn’t have to wear a mask or anything. I was going into these
cattail stands with a cyclone seeder and it would just bounce back at you after hitting this
wall of cattails. For quite a few years, that strip of cattails staid there. We used to take
pictures of them. If we had put it on by plane, it probably would have been better. It was
a soil sterilant.
MR. STUPPS: It worked pretty well too.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, it kept in open. We were trying to make openings in the cattail,
because it was a very shallow marsh. Cattail then, was like “loostrife, and fragmities” is
now it was kind of a noxious weed in that concentration.
MR. STUPPS: I remember that you had the “cattail crusher” when you were a student,
I’ve got a picture of that.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, but you made it. Oh had it stuck in a hole. Those picture are all
in the narratives with the big OC-6 stuck up in the air and you guys trying to pull me out,
because I had fallen into one of the holes with it. These were some interesting photos of
personnel in action!
MR. STUPPS: The narrative reports were really good back then.
MR. GUVATIS: They were.
MR. STUPPS: Do they still have the Refuge report?
MR. GOETTEL: Well, we do. We’re supposed to, but for five or so years there wasn’t a
lot of …stations just didn’t do them. But we’re getting back into doing them now. I’ll
tell you, it was the biggest tragedy, not to do the narrative reports.
MR. GUVATIS: There are some gaps there now. Some of the stations are backed up a
couple of years. Some years will never get done, with personnel changes and things like
that.
MR. GOETTEL: And all of that is lost. I remember the first thing you used to do when
you got to a new station was to sit down and read the narratives.
MR. STUPPS: Absolutely, absolutely!
MR. GUVATIS: What a wealth of information! And you wouldn’t have to reinvent the
wheel at the field level anyways. I think that a lot of the “reinventing the wheel” stuff
that you talked about was budgetary stuff. We went through budgetary crisis and
exercises. They call it “ZBB” and all these names. Every administration that came in
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had a new idea about how to track your finances and get budgeted for funding, and going
to Congress. That, and the political change in the Service, every time the administration
changes, or there is an election, it changes. There has been a lot of stability at the refuge
level, except on the supervisory end of things kind of fell apart at some point along the
way. There was no guidance from Washington down. It used to be, in the days of Jay
Cox Salyer and the early days, there was a real Service hierarchy just like there would be
in the military, all the way down through. That pride kind of filtered up and down the
tree. I can remember that even in my tenure the Washington office was just basically
emasculated. And even the regions! It became almost like the refuge managers had total
control of the programs. And sometimes that was fine and good, and sometimes it
wasn’t. Some managers needed or wanted some guidance. They weren’t all experienced
in every area. And I would hope that someday that this turns around again.
MR. STUPPS: One thing I remember from when I first started to work was that the
regional refuge supervisor would come out and did inspections. Each vehicle was
inspected, and they even went as far and to inspect the residents.
MR. GUVATIS: They inspected the logbooks.
MR. STUPPS: I remember George Spinner. I guess his wife didn’t keep a very clean
house. Erase that, I guess I shouldn’t say that! They used to inspect everything!
MR. GUVATIS: Even the quarters. They’d tell you that they needed to see the quarters,
and “what would be the best time?” And they would come and look at it. The log books,
the vehicles and the tractors, everything. That’s the way it was when I started. Mert
Radway was the assistant supervisor, and Tom Horne was the supervisor. But that kind
of thing would come and go a bit. I remember when Tom McKantor, Ed Moses, and I
were the three supervisors for the region. We did conduct some inspections of that type.
We would bring a person from CGS sometimes, on the team when we did the station
inspections. Every five years we’d do every station. So it would go in a five-year cycle.
Someone would concentrate on the books, some on budget and finance. Someone from
personnel would concentrate on the personnel actions and interview all of the staff. I
don’t know if you ever got called into one of those, but they’d actually bring each staff
member in by themselves and talk to you. That was probably in the early 1980s when I
was still around. Then it kind of went away after that.
MR. STUPPS: Oh yeah, I remember those! When Arthur Miller was the Regional
Refuge Supervisor, his big thing was that all of the tracks had to be tight on all of the
dozers. We didn’t really believe that it was that important. And I remember that one
time when he came out I took wood on a sprocket and backed a machine up to tighten the
tracks. If he had ever looked to see how those tracks were tight, but they were tight!
MR. GUVATIS: But how were they tight? [all laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: Tommy, where are you from originally? How did you get involved in
the Fish and Wildlife Service?
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MR. STUPPS: Delaware was where I got involved in the government. I was looking for
a job. I had just gotten out of the military.
MR. GOETTEL: What branch were you in?
MR. STUPPS: The Navy.
MR. GOETTEL: How long were you in?
MR. STUPPS: A year and a half.
MR. GOETTEL: That must have been after World War II.
MR. STUPPS: No, I was in World War II. I was in the Philippines when the war ended.
I came out, and I was looking for a job, and I went over to see the Refuge Manager, and I
got hired.
MR. GAVUTIS: This was in Maryland?
MR. STUPPS: Delaware, at Bombay Hook.
MR. GAVUTIS: You’re from Maryland or Delaware?
MR. STUPPS: I was born in Maryland. And George Spinner was the Refuge Manager,
he asked me to fill out a form. “Key” Wallace was at Blackwater then, he would come
over and help us on a job, and he was going to loose a maintenance man. He said he
would hire me if I could get on the list. I filled out the application and sent it in, and they
offered me the job up at Parker River. So in 1947, I went to Parker River.
MR. GAVUTIS: But you started down there, you actually worked down there?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I worked at Bombay Hook as a laborer for seventy-one cents an
hour.
MR. GAVUTIS: As a temporary?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, ok. When I came up here I earned twenty-two hundred dollars a
year. I was a CTC-5 for some reason. Then in 1951, I got on permanent. But I got my
law enforcement authority in 1949. It don’t seem that they would have given it to me,
but I looked at it just recently.
MR. GAVUTIS: Well, they were pretty casual. The further back you go, the more
casual it was! “Here’s your badge. Do good things for wildlife. Don’t shoot anybody,
and don’t hurt anybody”!
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MR. STUPPS: “Don’t do anything!”
MR. GUVATIS: “Protect the wildlife!” They would assign me to Agent Browney for a
couple of days, or any new people on my staff, when I was Great Swamp. Browney was
the agent for the State, and he would come in and he would take the trainee manager, or
the assistant manager, or whoever, the maintenance man, ‘cause we had a maintenance
man then at Great Swamp and they would go with him for a day or two during the duck
season or during the open deer season in New Jersey. They would look for people jack
lighting deer and so on. They would get involved in some cases and get a pep talk and
the agent would then write a letter and say that this person is ready for authority. He
would get them their credentials.
MR. STUPPS: The first training got was up at Moosehorn, the agents put it on. I think it
was in the early 1960s.
MR. GOETTEL: So you got your badge in 1949, but you didn’t get your training until
ten or fifteen years later?
MR. GUVATIS: That was like a workshop. They started do these workshops around the
nation.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it like a refresher class?
MR. GUVATIS: Well, it was both. It was an attempt at giving some training. But
people like Tom, and a lot of us had been around, and doing these things for years. We
had been rubbing elbows with the agents and other staff. We had learned, and gone to
court and witnessed testimony and stuff like that. We were somewhat proficient,
obviously at that point.
MR. GOETTEL: You were assuming that the agents had training. You have to wonder
what kind of training they had.
MR. STUPPS: I can’t remember if it was at this session or not, but I remember talking to
Orin Steele or Duke White, and they said they didn’t have any training either. And they
said they could remember shooting over people heads that wouldn’t come out of a blind.
And they were shooting.
MR. GUVATIS: Those were the good old day. [joking]
MR. STUPPS: Imagine doing that today! This was probably in the 1960s. I don’t know
what year they started.
MR. GUVATIS: There were wild stories then, about poachers shooting, and not over
your head either, you know, between your legs and by your ear!
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MR. STUPPS: I can remember out on Pine Island they would actually search, go right
down a guys legs and the whole works. Physically search each person if they were just
walking through the marsh. They didn’t even see them hunting!
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, things have changed.
MR. STUPPS: It certainly has!
MR. GOETTEL: You were saying earlier that they gave you your handcuffs, and your
“45”?
MR. STUPPS: That was just a joke.
MR. GUVATIS: They did that as a joke. They laid it out on the table.
MR. STUPPS: On my bed!
MR. GUVATIS: And you thought that this was what you were going to be into!
Handcuffs and “45s” ! Actually they never issued guns early on. And most stations
didn’t even have them. Parker River was probably one of the first ones to have them
because of their serious law enforcement problems. With a couple hundred thousand or
half a million visitors there, or however many it was they actually had guns issued. I can
remember having a “22” pistol that I paid twenty-two dollars for. It was a German Burgo
revolver, and that was my sidearm for years. Then I went to a station that had a gun.
Or you carried a shotgun in the vehicle during the hunting season to dispatch a wounded
deer, or to make you feel a little more comfortable striding up to guys with guns in their
hands! It was pretty casual!
MR. STUPPS: It certainly was!
MR. GUVATIS: We always marveled, and thought it was a credit to the Service
employees that nobody ever got shot. And nobody ever shot anyone.
MR. STUPPS: There would have been some lawsuits!
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah! I think that overall, with these jack-of-all-trades refuge people,
all the way from maintenance staff, to Refuge Manager to biologist, whatever they were,
handled all these duties with no training.
MR. STUPPS: With no training.
MR. GUVATIS: With no training and to their credit. They used good judgment. And
you never heard of anybody getting shot, or shooting somebody unnecessarily, or any of
that kind of stuff. They used remarkable restraint, and tact and diplomacy. Obviously we
had some people who were better than others on the staffs but we went for a long time,
and it’s a miracle almost, that something bad didn’t happen. If you look at the fire
program where people actually died, this never really happened, as I can remember, in
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the law enforcement. If it did it was very rare. And nobody that I can remember at the
stations that I was involved with ever had a problem. They used to routinely shoot dogs
that were killing deer, running deer, but again, I think that the public accepted the
authority then too. It wasn’t abused, and it was respected. Now, everybody questions
authority. That’s been going on since the 1960s and 1970s.
MR. STUPPS: That was a big change.
MR. GUVATIS: The image has changed too.
MR. STUPPS: I think it was the late 1940s or early 1950s that they brought in a tractor
trailer, and left it full of creosote lumber, there at the airport. We were supposed to
unload it there, because the bridge was only ten ton, and haul it down to the refuge.
MR. GUVATIS: This was at Parker River Refuge.
MR. STUPPS: The stuff was just leaching the creosote, and I said, “We’re not going to
do this. We’re going to take the truck down over the bridge.
MR. GUVATIS: Over that rickety little bridge!
MR. STUPPS: Over the bridge, and I bet you there was thirty or forty tons total.
MR. GUVATIS: But it was long, and it was distributed over a big area! Two wheels on
the bridge, and two wheels on the other side!
MR. STUPPS: But I had never driven a tractor-trailer in my life! But I got on it, and
drove it across the bridge and took it down there.
MR. GUVATIS: You didn’t know any better! [laughing]
MR. STUPPS: No, and I got away with it.
MR. GUVATIS: Hey, I was a student out of UMASS, a city boy out of Lawrence, and
this guy, before I knew it, had me in a dump truck hauling gravel from Rowley. He says,
“You’re going to get experience from all levels, you know!” And you had me running
the dozer, the “D-4” I can remember that. Then, down at Brigantine, literally, they turned
me loose with that road grader on that seven- mile auto tour route. God forbid, and I was
a nervous wreck, running these levers, and pulling these things and going by cars! It was
open to the public. Holy cripes! I made it around with killing anybody or without going
into the marsh! When I think about the things that we did, it’s amazing. But we all got
through it. We all understood the whole program that way. I thought it was healthy.
You did, everybody did. That every refuge manager trainee got to run the dump truck,
the dozer, the grader, and then had to maintain it. To know were the grease fittings were.
And then, if you ever became a manager, you had some appreciation, respect and
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understanding of the needs. And if you had a maintenance man who wasn’t greasing the
tractor, you’d know it. We had these inspections then that would mean something then!
We had to take care of airboats too.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah airboats too. I believe “Key” Wallace was the first one that had an
airboat.
MR. GUVATIS: I think it was a Blackwater.
MR. STUPPS: I think he built it himself.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, they were all built early. The one I had at Montezuma, I took to
Canada for two months, Lake Appatibby, on the Quebec, Ontario border with an agent
assigned. We lived in tents, and trapper’s cabins for two months. We night lighted at
night and bait trapped during the day, and slept a little bit in between. We were there
until early September, when the frost came in. And we banded thousands of ducks. But
we used to work with the agents. They called it management enforcement then. That
was their title. They were game management agents. And they were part of the division
of management enforcement I guess. But they did a lot of other things besides law
enforcement then, surveys and banding, and all kinds of things. And we used to go with
them sometimes as Refuge employees.
MR. STUPPS: They went up into Canada. But we had no training back then.
MR. GUVATIS: It was all on the job training. I learned more on the refuges. I think
J.C. Apple who I never considered a real biologist, but he was a refuge manager. I think
he was the one who showed me how to age and sex waterfowl. If he wasn’t the one, I
don’t know who was, because Bill Farb wasn’t even there when started as a student. He
came just after that, maybe my second or third year there. There aren’t many people
around now who know how to age and sex waterfowl, internally, and knowing how to
use the wind characteristics. Its incredible, identifying ducklings that are six weeks old,
and don’t even have all of their plumage. When you get up in Canada, we were banding
golden eyes, bald pates, pintails, ringtails, and I defy 99% of the people who are in the
Service now to even begin to tell me what species they are, let alone what age are or what
sex they are! It’s amazing, the skills that we developed just with very little training. But
somebody showed me how to sex a duck or a goose and I started with that, and became
very proficient at it, obviously.
MR. STUPPS: Ed Addy, he was the biologist when I first went up there.
MR. GUVATIS: He was at Patuxent when I was there. Ed used to help me, but I think
J.C. was the one who showed me. He had enough experience. Everybody did. I mean
when you shot the cannon over black ducks, the whole staff was there. Even the
secretary was probably even there, all the guys were there at least. Secretaries were
usually women in those days. There were a few men. Howard Jung was a male secretary
when he started. He started as a GS-2 at Fort Niobrara I believe it was in region six, now.
13
He always talked about starting as a GS-2, and ending up as a GS-14 or the equivalent of
an assistant Regional Director type position, like Don Young would have been in. We
had a male secretary at Iroquois, Bob Wolfe. He was a wonderful secretary for “Smitty”.
MR. GOETTEL: Some of those guys had law enforcement authority too, right?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, they did. Right. Everybody did, even the Biologists did. Well,
you needed it then, at least we thought we did. We were kind of groping our way along
on some of this stuff. The rapport that we now have with the local police and the game
warden came along later. I remember Norm Marble used to always be at Parker River
helping out.
MR. STUPPS: And Mark Tollomio.
MR. GUVATIS: Yes, Mark Tollomio and other guys whose names I can’t remember.
MR. GOETTEL: [to Mr. Stupps], So basically, you spent your whole career at Parker
River. When did you retire?
MR. STUPPS: 1987.
MR. GUVATIS: Yes sir, a lot of managers come and go. It was the continuity that we
had then, and probably still do. The secretaries like Mrs. Welch, could basically run
those stations between managers, and did. Then they trained the new manager. A
greenhorn, came in and they taught them how to run the maintenance and operations
programs. And a lot of the other parts the program too. They would do the candidate
sites for waterfowl, and doing patrols in the whalers during the waterfowl season. I came
remember Woody running me around on biological surveys. You needed two people to
be jumping in and out of the boat into the marsh, taking samples or making cases or
whatever.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, the maintenance people used to do the surveys.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, I remember that. When I was a student, I think you or somebody
took me down and showed me how to do the waterfowl survey. The shorebird or wading
bird survey, were done once a week. Somebody did, it wasn’t J. C., it must have been
you or …
MR. STUPPS: Was Stanwood still working there?
MR. GUVATIS: No. Well if he was, I never… He was working at sub headquarters I
think when I first started. But I never really met the guy. Or if I did, I don’t remember
him. I think he was sick then, or something. Didn’t he die on the job?
MR. STUPPS: He retired and didn’t live very long afterwards.
14
MR. GUVATIS: I think I knew Moe Stanwood’s name, and I knew where he lived, but I
don’t think I ever met the guy. I think he was already gone when I got there. Maybe he
was doing it before I got there. We used to have a weekly survey that we drove.
MR. GOETTEL: You were saying that the Manager at Parker River when you started
was a GS-7?
MR. STUPPS: A GS-7, or a P-2 whatever that was.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh that’s right. That was before the GS ratings.
MR. GUVATIS: [to Mr. Stupps], You were a WG?
MR. STUPPS: I was a CPC-5.
MR. GUVATIS: Then what did you go to?
MR. STUPPS: A GS-5. I was a refuge assistant. I was a refuge assistant until they
changed me to a Foreman-3.
MR. GUVATIS: And that was to your advantage. I can remember discussions at some
point when we were going to put you into GS, or leave you at WG. And you were far
ahead. You were making more money there, than the managers for a while I think!
MR. STUPPS: No I was pretty close.
MR. GUVATIS: There were times when they did these wage surveys, and you’d jump
ahead because the GS didn’t keep up with the current surveys. They had these wage rate
surveys every year, or every couple of years.
MR. STUPPS: Every year. We used to do them for the local area. We would try to go
to the places that would pay the most. But our people did so many variable jobs that it
was hard to get someone to compare to.
MR. GUVATIS: They’d pick the electrical duties or the mechanical duties to compare
to.
MR. STUPPS: The mechanics would go to the equipment operators. And I don’t think
we could get into the plumbing and electrical, because that would be above where we
were. But it was hard for us to justify the wages to where we could keep people.
MR. GUVATIS: But we expected people to do all of these things. They had to know
electrical, and plumbing, and be able to do it. That’s the thing, they were all jacks-of-all-trades.
15
MR. STUPPS: And law enforcement too. There were so many things doing on, that
finally we had to follow the lead agency, which was up in Portsmouth. I don’t know if it
was the Air Base or the Naval Shipyard. Everybody got a big raise. As a matter of fact, I
was a GS-5, and they went ahead of me.
MR. GUVATIS: And you were supervising them. I think I remember some of that.
MR. STUPPS: I don’t know who was there as refuge manager, but they’d have to write a
letter each year to justify giving me a step increase before it was time. So I was in that
part of all that. I think it was Bill French who talked me into going into the wage grade
supervisor. So I went into that, which was a much better paying job. I got quite a raise.
MR. GUVATIS: Well you deserved it! [then to Mr. Goettel] He ran the whole program.
We had a farming program back in those days. We plowed and planted what seemed like
acres and acres, maybe it wasn’t, but it was in the . . .
MR. STUPPS: We used to plant about one hundred acres, over one hundred acres of
upland, and one hundred acres in the marsh.
MR. GUVATIS: There was winter rye. And in the marsh you’d put millet. There was
rye too, along the edges. We were really into farming in the Service back then. In this
region and probably all regions. That kind of got phased out. Then they went to
permanent pastures and we used to and they still do cattail crushing and spraying and
mowing of vegetation. But we didn’t really get into the planting of marsh vegetation. I
can remember at Montezuma, they used to go out… there’s pictures and movies . . .Larry
Smith would be a good contact for this region, even though he’s not here… he was at
Monomoy and then at Iroquois forever…he’s got documentation. If you want
documentation, he’s the guy. He’s got the films on the night lighting. I can remember
seeing pictures of Vern Dewey who was a clerk at Montezuma when Larry Smith was the
manager there, walking on the mudflats with snowshoes, seeding Walter’s millet, or Jiff
millet, one or the other, during the draw down. And one hundred thousand ducks would
come into that impoundment. They would show the pictures of the timber area right next
to these mudflats having one hundred thousand mallards. And in this region that was a
lot of ducks. It was a one thousand acre impoundment. Vern Dewey planted the whole
edge of it in millet. He did it with his hand-cranked seeder.
MR. GEOTTEL: Yes, he is a legend.
MR. STUPPS: It must have been in the early 1950s, that I built a carrying cage on one of
the trucks. I used to go down to Bombay Hook and Blackwater, and bring up mallards,
and Canada geese. I still have a picture of cage I built. I don’t know how many mallards
I could bring back. It was a two tiered for Canada geese, and four or five tiered for duck.
[battery failure]
Mr. GUVATIS: When’s the last time you looked?
16
MR. GOETTEL: Just a minute ago.
MR. GUVATIS: Oh really? Now he’s getting proficient with his equipment here. [to
Mr. Stupps] You know what you gotta do? You’ve gotta get one of those from the other
regions, that aren’t using them, and run to them! [talking about tape recorder]
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, you’re right.
MR. GUVATIS: Run them parallel and then just erase one of them later, and reuse it.
MR. GOETTEL: I might have to bum a couple of batteries off of you later, George, if
this goes out again. [Mr. Guvatis tries to get them] No, sit tight, we’ll see how it goes.
MR. GUVATIS: Well, I should get them out of the freezer. What kind are they “AA”?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah.
MR. GUVATIS: Let me pull a couple out.
MR. GOETTEL: [to Mr. Stupps] did you build the impoundments at Parker River?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I was there when they were built. They had a yard and a half
dragline. A guy by the name of Jody Katren from Missouri, he was the operator. He was
the second operator. The first operator came from Amesbury, Ed Valley.
MR. GOETTEL: Were they Service employees?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah. Well, they were hired and put on the payroll.
MR: GUVATIS: [returning with batteries] I’ve got more downstairs. I don’t have my
glasses on, is that an “AA”?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, that’s the right size, thanks.
MR. GOETTEL: O.K. we’ll try it again here, Tommy. You started to say that you
started working on the dikes in 1948?
MR. STUPPS: In 1948. And the north and south pool was completed in I believe it was
1950.
MR. GOETTEL: Those are huge dikes.
MR. STUPPS: I think they are 1.8, but the base, I forget the size of the base, but the top
was ten foot. And I think it had a three to one slope. It seems to me that they were sixty
to seventy feet at the base.
MR. GOETTEL: I wouldn’t doubt it.
17
MR. STUPPS: A lot of material went out there.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you haul the material out there?
MR. STUPPS: No, we took the material out of what they called the “barrow pit”. We
took it out of one part of the marsh, and poured it up on top of the marsh. Joe Hager, who
was the state Ornithologist, said we would never be successful. In, number one, getting
black ducks up on our fields, in which he was proven wrong. And he said that the dikes
would never work either, they would never hold water. He was partially right on that
one. We held water in the spring. But we were not successful in holding water other
times.
MR. GUVATIS: The dikes didn’t leak. It seemed like the ground water would go down,
and the impoundment would go down with it.
MR. STUPPS: There was nothing running in.
MR. GUVATIS: No, there was nothing running in, and it was sand. Probably, when it
was clean sand, before it got covered with organic material and vegetation, and stuff, it
probably did drain even faster than it did after it silted up. Or where there was still peat
underneath.
MR. STUPPS: The north pool would hold more water than the south pool would.
MR. GUVATIS: I remember that.
MR. STUPPS: When Nightingale was there, we used to try to put dye in it to try and see
where it was going. We’d go out and look at the creek, and see if we could see any due
coming out.
MR. GUVATIS: I think it was just the water table.
MR. STUPPS: But it held more in one than the other.
MR. GUVATIS: The south pool had more sand. And it has less organics in it. That was
part of it too. There are a lot of theories on what did it. Do you guys want a drink? Are
you thirsty? Would you like some lemonade or something?
MR. GOETTEL AND MR. STUPPS: No thanks.
MR. GUVATIS: [referring to tape recorder] is it working again?
MR GOETTEL: Yeah, we’re all set.
MR. GUVATIS: Do you know how much you lost?
18
MR. GOETTEL: We didn’t loose that much. I had just glanced at it. And I have been
glancing at it regularly.
MR. GUVATIS: You have become a professional interviewer. You need a checklist.
MR. GOETTEL: Two tape recorders!
MR. GUVATIS: That’s what I would have! That’s the reason, I keep saying when I’m
out in the field taking notes, and I keep saying that I should get a tape recorder. But boy,
if you loose that whole days worth of talking. As long as you keep checking it, and knew
that it was working and know what happened to it. Even when my pad gets wet, or my
pencil stops writing, at least I know it.
MR. GUVATIS: [to Mr. Stupps] did you say that you brought some pictures and things
to show to Tom?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah. Sure, I’ll show them to Tom later.
MR. GOETTEL: Good, I appreciate that.
MR. STUPPS: Now, the “stageamen” pool, which is about a one hundred acre pool, the
National Guard brought in two D-7s. And I don’t know who was there then.
MR. GUVATIS: Those were big machines. That was down when Nightingale was there,
I was told. It was done before I got there.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, it was. That’s right. I went down there with no engineering. No
nothing and I just started pushing dirt. There was a creek, that was probably sixty or
seventy feet wide, a tidal creek. There was a footbridge that went across there from Plum
Island to Stage Island. I built out from this side, as far as I could with what material I
had. Just sand. Then I went on the other side, and I pushed up a great big pile of dirt.
MR. GUVATIS: How did you get on the other side?
MR. STUPPS: You could go around Bar Head.
MR. GUVATIS: So it wasn’t really, totally an island?
MR. STUPPS: No. And I thought I had enough dirt that I could close it off on one tide.
And I did. I closed it off on one tide. But there was a lot of dirt out there. I remember…
MR. GUVATIS: And it’s held? It held to this day?
MR: STUPPS: Oh yeah!
MR: GOETTEL: It must have been mostly muck, wasn’t it though?
19
MR. STUPPS: It was mostly sand.
MR. GUVATIS: It was glacial till. And the first part was probably all sand though.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, it was all sand.
MR. GUVATIS: From the other side, from the dunes. Where did you get that fill, out of
the sand pits there?
MR. STUPPS: No, there was a little dune to the north of it. So I used that. And it
wasn’t very wide, just enough to hold the machine up. We didn’t get another machine in
there until a few years later so we could build it the right way when we had enough
material.
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember my student report, just being new to the Service, and
knowing that Nightingale just built that dike, and the other dikes had been built before
him I guess, that I was recommending impoundment using Grape Island and Cross Farm.
MR. STUPPS: I remember you talking about that.
MR. GUVATIS: That’s how we operated in those days. That should make a nice
impoundment! Connect Grape Island with this one, and that one! [laughing] No feat too
big!
MR. STUPPS: And nobody asked anyone.
MR. GUVATIS: No, we just did it!
MR. STUPPS: I can remember on Stage Island, Arthur Miller, who was regional
supervisor, I was up in Maine, at Moosehorn, and I was staying in the same hotel he was,
and we were talking. And he said it would be nice if we had a dike across Stage Island.
He probably talked to some people.
MR. GUVATIS: He probably had talked to some engineers or something.
MR. STUPPS: No, we had no engineers then.
MR. GUVATIS: That’s before they got in the way.
MR. STUPPS: He probably discussed it with Gordon.
MR. GUVATIS: Or maybe Salyer in Washington.
MR. STUPPS: I bet you not, because I had started and I didn’t have any level or
anything, so I took and drove a post in the ground, and took a level, and leveled a stick
20
across it and pull my hand level on it. And we’d sight down that to see what height I was
at. And it worked!
MR. GOETTEL: No laser levels then? [all laughing]
MR. GUVATIS: Well, when I started, we had these dumpy levels. We had the tripods.
My supervisor Tom Horne at Montezuma came out and gave me a two-hour lesson on
how to run a dumpy level. Hell, we made six hundred acres of impoundment, and six
miles of dike, with just this dumpy level and some stakes. We got patted on the back for
a nice straight dike with good slope, three to one, or five to one. It was interesting, we
were surveyors, and we were everything. And firefighters too!
MR. STUPPS: That’s another thing that Arthur Miller would do. He’d come out, and he
would set the marsh on fire. The Georgetown fire tower, they threatened finally, that
they were going to put us in jail. He would come out and do it.
MR. GUVATIS: We were the “Feds” you couldn’t do that to us. People really accepted
that in those days to a large degree. A lot of it was Federal sovereignty, it’s the federal
government, and “they can do whatever the hell they want”!
MR. STUPPS: Well heck, Moe Stanley, when I first came up here, he didn’t even think
we had to stop for red lights! He came up the Merrick Parkway in a truck, right after the
Second World War, or during it, I’m not sure which, and he drove all the way up the
Merrick Parkway in this government truck.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GUVATIS: It was a “no trucks” road. I can remember we used to waive through
the New Hampshire tolls, the Portsmouth tolls, because we were government. They just
waived us through. Just took your horn and say, “look at the plate”, and away we go!
MR. STUPPS: I think the worst trip I ever made, I don’t know what year it was, I was
sent up to bring back a dozer, and I got a picture of that trailer, it was a homemade trailer,
it was a GMC dump truck, probably a ton and half. It didn’t have no doors on it, and it
was right hand drive. And it didn’t have nothing from the engine, back. No mufflers, no
nothing! Moe Stanley’s boy went with me, and we could even hear ourselves talk! The
people would go by, and they would be holding their ears. Why we didn’t get [in trouble,
I’ll never know.]
MR. GUVATIS: Only in those days could you have done that! What year was that?
MR. STUPPS: This had to be in 1948, or 1949. One time, when I was coming through
one town, and there was a hill, back then the old trucks didn’t have much power, and a
cop ran up, and jumped up on the running board, and said, “Where you from?” So I told
him I was with the government, and he jumped off and left!
21
MR. GUVATIS: [joking] “This is government business boy, step aside!”
MR. STUPPS: It’s just amazing that someone didn’t get killed. Because we had no
training, we just got in the truck, and drove! In this truck I was driving, the trailer was
nine foot, six. Eight foot is the law. We used it right up into the 1950s. I’ve got a
picture of it.
MR. GOETTEL: What was that “cattail crusher” that you were talking about? You said
you made that Tommy? What was that like? I’ve never heard of that.
MR. GUVATIS: We’ve got pictures of that. We’ve got pictures of all of that stuff.
Those narrative reports, and what Tom’s got, it’s probably easier to find in Tom’s files,
and a lot of that stuff is in the narrative reports.
MR. STUPPS: I think the Refuge got rid of all their files. That’s where I got most of
these pictures, because the Refuge was throwing them away.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no! No kidding?
MR. GUVATIS: You wouldn’t believe the stuff that gets “chucked” out of the files!
MR. STUPPS: Tom Horne didn’t like to keep nothing!
MR. GUVATIS: When I was doing the “sick sea” stuff at Parker River, I saw narrative
reports that I had written when I was there, or my staff had written. There were four
copies, Washington copy, regional copy, circulating copy for the country, and the station
copy. With the circulating copy, the tradition was that when it came back, it would be
sent to whoever the station manager was at the time. That kind of fell apart. But all four
copies were still in the file!
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember the regional office saying “We don’t want these
anymore, we’ve read them, and we’re sending them back”. And Washington sent them
back, at some point, whether they had them archived or not. I’ll bet you they didn’t. So
there was four copies. And they said just take them, rather than taking notes out of them.
We don’t need them. Everything that had more than two copies, I left. I mean, when
there was less than two copies, I left. When there was three and four, I just took a copy.
So I’ve got some of those. With the blessing of the Refuge, they said they didn’t want all
these copies of these reports. They have the original color photos in them.
MR. STUPPS: I heard that Parker River got rid of theirs.
MR. GUVATIS: Well, when I was down there they had most of them. There were one
or two years missing from when they actually changed the narrative report period, to fit
the program management, or some other such foolishness. There was overlap in some,
22
and gaps in some. Almost every station had a gap for about six months. But they [Parker
River] still have them there, Tom.
MR. STUPPS: They do?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, in fact I’ve got a few that should go back to them. They are ones
where there was a second copy that I barrowed.
MR. STUPPS: I thought sure that they had gotten rid of them.
MR. GUVATIS: No, they still have them. That’s what I did last winter. Moses and I
were down there. They are almost all there. What the heck were we talking about? I
know we started on something else and drifted off.
MR. GOETTEL: I mentioned the “cattail crusher”.
MR. GUVATIS: Oh, the “cattail crusher”. That was welded, Tom, and these other guys
welded angle iron braces on drums that would roll.
MR. STUPPS: They were fifty-five gallon drums, we would put three together, and weld
angle iron so that the angle iron would stand up and cut the cattail as we put weight on it.
MR. GUVATIS: Did you have water in the drums?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah.
MR. GUVATIS: So they’d fill these drums with water for more weight. It actually did
more damage to the plant, than cutting it off. It injured the plant. It put world of hurt on
that plant! It’s like tatting hay, you know? And somehow, I think it locks up the
nutrients or something, and they can’t get back into the roots. That’s what they do with
hay. They tat it, or knick it, and it makes it dry quicker but it also holds the nutrients in.
But that’s all they did. You could pull a bank of those that was ten or fifteen feet wide. I
remember it being quite wide.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, it was. I don’t remember if it was three or four barrels wide,
maybe twelve feet wide.
MR. GAVUTIS: Like discs, gang discs. Just knock that stuff down. And underneath all
that cattail was all this dormant seed. There was hundreds of years of seed, and muck,
and peat there. It was all salt march. Even a dozen years of millets and smart weeds, a
nut grasses and sedges, and all kinds of stuff would grow up fast. And you’d have
waterfowl food suddenly.
MR. STUPPS: It would open it up.
23
MR. GUVATIS: It would open it up, and you’d have nesting and you’d have waterfowl
feeding. Basically what they were doing was interspersing feed, and open water, and
everything in one hundred acres of cattail. Was fragmities the problem then?
MR. STUPPS: It was just beginning.
MR. GUVATIS: And loostrife was just beginning too. So cattail was the big villain. At
Montezuma, they used to burn it. And they used to mow it and crush it. They had a one
thousand acre impoundment with mostly cattail in it. Where ever you had a too shallow
impoundment were the muskrats couldn’t work the roots in the winter, which was the
case at Parker River and at Montezuma, they would end up with a cattail monotype.
MR. STUPPS: That probably helped the loostrife to get started too.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, the disturbance. A lot of the things we did. The draw downs,”
and flooding would bring in loostrife. We didn’t understand that loostrife would be such
a problem. And now, I’ve used, and I know the Refuges have too, used millet seeding at
a critical time during the draw down to smother out any loostrife reproduction.
MR. STUPPS: Oh, is that right?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, because you know how fast that stuff grows, it’s like buckwheat.
If you put buckwheat on it, it’s good. That’s buckwheat in two thirds of my garden.
Now that the kids have left home, I don’t need it. I put that stuff on, and that will out run
any weed going. And that’s on very light. [pointing out the window] If you put it on
real heavy, like you have to sometimes when the weeds are heavy, it will just kill
everything. Plus, the buckwheat goes way down to the nutrients.
MR. STUPPS: We used to aerial seed millet in the south pool. We’d draw in down and
used to get some good stands.
MR. GUVATIS: Well, I do it out here when we have dry season, and the pond goes
down fast, I put millet on it. But that’s a good way to keep out loostrife encroachment.
If you go into a drought suddenly, in July, just walk around it once a week with a crank
seeder, and put millet seed on it. You won’t get any loostrife seedlings surviving. It will
just smother them out, because they grow so fast, and loostrife seedlings grow relatively
slow the first year. In New York they used to do that in some of the State management
areas, Oak Orchard, and the one named Montezuma, and Helen’s Island.
MR. GOETTEL: So Montezuma was your first station George? Was it your first
permanent station?
MR. GUVATIS: Right, it was my first permanent station as a trainee. I went there
mainly to. . . Tom Horne made me a construction foreman. I knew nothing about it!
He taught me how to run levels and I ended up with a twenty-man crew there. I had three
chainsaw operators, three dragline operators, and three oilers. There were several bull
24
dozer operators and several laborers and actually, near the end, I had a foreman. Still, I
was responsible for that whole program. Finally, I hired the foreman after about the first
six months or so, because the crew was twenty people.
MR. GOETTEL: What was to build the dikes?
MR. GUVATIS: We were building the dikes below Routes 5, and 20. There were six
hundred acres of impoundment, and five miles of dike. We had to clear the swamp
timber, which was mostly white oak, red maple, silver maple, elm, and stuff like that.
We cleared for five miles of dike, one hundred yards wide so we could run dragline. And
the upland parts we built with dozers and then when we got down to the deep parts with
the muck and peat we ran draglines on mats. We had a huge Lima dragline. We had a
“22-B” and a “15-B” which were smaller draglines. They had like a three quarter yard
buckets, and five-eighths buckets. The Lima had a yard bucket I guess, or a yard and a
quarter. They would go maybe one hundred feet a day. It was all staked out. You had
the centerline of the dike, and toes of the five and one slope and the three and one slope,
and then the twenty feet of a berm to run on with the machine. The barrow pits were like
thirty feet wide on each side. We’d push the stumps and the trees back in. There was no
salvaging or anything. Tom Horne wanted us to burn the stuff. Some of the guys on the
staff said that the peat would burn. But he wanted it burnt, “there will be predators and
stuff living in there”. And he was right. So we started burning. That was my first
permanent year with the Service. I didn’t have any law enforcement authority, but
believe me, that first year and a half, we spent a lot of time on fires. We had multiple
chain reaction collisions because in the swamp, at night, the peat would be burning. The
people would come down off of the hills into this fog band where the cold air and the
smoke would settle, and they couldn’t see the road. No body was killed on the Refuge,
except for on the through way. There were other peat fires burning off the Refuge.
Somebody was killed there. But we had two serious, twenty or twenty-five car multiple
collisions. We were out there digging trenches with the backhoes and bringing water
from the canal and the lake in to the fires. We were surrounding the fires with ditches,
and pumping and digging with the dozers. You’d be walking along, and you’d drop in up
to at least your waist, or your chest into a fire pit because it would be hollow. And you’d
think that the fire would be out and you’d find it burning on tree roots. It would pop up
somewhere else, and the wind would fan it and it would get up on top and run and go
down, it was a nightmare! We fought those fires for months, and months, and months. It
took two summers to get them out. Tom Horne finally stopped saying, “burn the
windrows.” Some of them were still there!
MR. STUPPS: You didn’t get them all burned?
MR. GUVATIS: That was five miles of dike on two sides. So that was ten miles of
windrows to burn. And a lot of it was organic soil and it burned out like it did at Stage
Island. I guess you guys had some fires there. It made wonderful habitat. The fire
would go down to the water table. And until it hit the water table, it would just keep
burning. Those roots would burn.
MR. STUPPS: You didn’t even know that they were burning!
25
MR. GUVATIS: No! And you could smell it, but you couldn’t even see the smoke
unless you really looked. We found that the only way to really get them out was to get a
dozer right in the fire hole and dig it out, and sort it, and wet it down as you did it. We
had these pumps. We had no fire training whatsoever and it was fairly hazardous. We
had people fall into fire pits and scramble out and jump in the ditch to get wet real quick!
Their feet would be burning, or their hip boots would be melting, that kind of thing. It
was kind of interesting there. That was my primary job. I also worked with the agent
and got my law enforcement authority when I was there. We did controlled burns on the
cattail marshes there, like Tom was talking about. We used to fire them up every couple
of years and burn them off, and get rid of the biomass, and actually extend the life
expectancy of the impoundments buy getting rid of some of that biomass. Again, you’d
get a regeneration of the millets, and the “smart weeds” and a really nice response for the
first year or two until the cattail would come back in again.
MR. GOETTEL: So, you were there for a couple of years?
MR. GUVATIS: I was there a year and a half. From there I went to Iroquois Refuge for
a couple of years, under Henry Whitley. “Nook” Wilson was the maintenance man there,
and Rudy “somebody” was a laborer, and Joanne Smith was the secretary. Henry
Whitley was a remarkable man in his day. He had built these dikes that you had [to Mr.
Stupps] but he built seven miles of dike, half way out to Atlantic City! It had a sand core,
no clay. Just sand dikes, and he vegetated them with sprigs of dune grass. He was a
remarkable man, he probably never got due credit for what he did. He kind of fell apart
at the end of his career. He took up heavy drinking. I ended up having to run that station
during his last year. It was sort of a sad way to go. In fact, that whole area is bad when it
comes to alcohol. It’s depressed with it. There’s a bar on every corner, and people down
in that country were depressed. They were all drinkers. The whole staff was heavy
drinkers. His last year, he never got the fanfare that he deserved. He did an incredible
feat, building that dike. They had carryall scrapers and draglines and dozers.
MR. STUPPS: I think he got so much excess material.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, he did! That’s how he got all of his equipment. And he supplied
the whole region, like Eddie French is trying to do now, with his brother-in-law.
Equipment from all over the region probably came from Whitley. There’s a guy that did
single handedly, he only had two maintenance people, and a patrolman, almost all of the
work. But down there, I kind of ran the operations program, because he left while I was
there. He retired. People from all over the region came. Larry Smith was there, taking
pictures.
MR. GOETTEL: This was down at Brigantine?
MR. GUVATIS: This was Brigantine.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought you said “Iroquois”.
26
MR. GUVATIS: No, then went…
MR. GOETTEL: You went from Iroquois to Brigantine?
MR. GUVATIS: No. I went to Brigantine, and then I swapped. . . the order was
Montezuma, Brigantine, then Iroquois. Ed Moses was at Iroquois when I was at
Brigantine, he had started Erie with “Smitty”. And Moses went to Great Meadows or
someplace, maybe Parker River. I moved in there for a year at Iroquois under Larry
Smith. That’s where I sprayed Agent Orange for a month. And we did all kinds of
things.
I also built one thousand acres of impoundment there. We had three pans, and a couple
of big dozers. We also had a couple of draglines too. I remember one day, after we were
done with the project. We built a dike, and they had estimates of one hundred thousand
dollars to build it. The lowest estimate bid to build this dike was around two hundred
thousand. So Tom Horne, having used me at Great Swamp, and knowing my
capabilities, and having had me work with Whitley at Brigantine, and knowing that I
knew how to do these things said, “we’ll do a force account”. And we went out and
hired contractors. Dick Murphy was one of them. He would say, “all right, just tell us
what you want”. There was people back then that would work for you. He’d write up the
“specs”. We would put service recorder clocks on the machines, so we could track them.
I still have some of the old discs and the keys.
MR. STUPPS: Do you?
MR. GUVATIS: Oh yeah. It’s amazing. But it worked.
MR. STUPPS: You couldn’t beat it.
MR. GUVATIS: We when out and got the equipment and the operators and paid them
by the clock. We changed the clocks every day, changed the discs, and kept them for the
records. When we were all done, we built that dike for forty thousand dollars. They only
had one hundred and twenty and we built it for forty. Then I found an old dike in the
woods that split the impoundment in half and made two impoundments, a four hundred
and a six hundred acre one. We renovated that dike. The last day was almost like a
salute. We marched all that equipment in rows. We had all these pans and dozers.
Everywhere I went, we built a pond at the residence I was living at. They just went
around and around, all day. And that pond went down. It’s there right now. It’s a
beautiful farm pond, probably twenty-five feet deep, at Iroquois.
MR. GOETTEL: How many acres?
MR. GUVATIS: It’s about an acre. They just, all day, dug, dug, dug. Then they still
weren’t out of money. That’s when they went over to the Job Corps, and started on
another project, and I transferred. They were still spending that one hundred and twenty
thousand when I left. We built miles and miles of dike. And we built what we called
27
little “dikelettes” which were little organic dikes. They weren’t hauled in clay material
with stone riprap and all that. But they were twenty to one slopes so that they could over
top every spring, and not wash out. They were maybe twenty-five to one, very long
slopes. They lasted for years. The muskrats raised hell with them, as they do with any
dike. But they were so long, and so wide that they never got through them for years.
They had to keep eating in on the pool sides for years to get the dike riddled.
From there I went to Great Swamp. Tom [Horne] wanted me to go the Great Swamp.
When we moved in to the house at Iroquois, we couldn’t get our queen-size mattress in
the door. And “Smitty” says, “I’ll put another window in there at the top of the stairs, so
we can get your queen-sized mattress in. But you have to promise me you’re going to
stay for two years”! I said, “O.K., I promise”. And I’m there a year, and Tom Horne
says he wants me to go to Great Swamp, and “Smitty” says,” What do you mean? We
got a two year commitment out of this thing”! Whose boss here? You know Horne!
And I said, “Geez, I thought you thought more of me than to send me to a place like
Great Swamp”. I was kind of his “pet” boy. I really didn’t think he’d do that to me. It
had such an awful reputation. It was a new station in New Jersey no less. It was in north
Jersey, near Times Square. It was only twenty or twenty-five miles from Times Square.
I thought, “God, what are they doing to me”? I went there, and when I got there we
walked all of the wetlands on the refuge. It was coming out of long, long drought. We
walked along these little brooks, like Black Brook and Grey Brook, and we found three
duck broods on the whole refuge. And there were probably not a total of two or three
acres of water, mostly in stream channels and ditch bottoms. There were huge ditches
that went on for miles. And Tom wanted to start pumping money in. And again, we
hired one guy, with his machines. He had a pay loader and he had a little dozer. He
would jump back and forth from one to the other. And we had those clocks. Tom Horne
started pouring money in. And the first year we had no water. We had two or three old
wood duck boxes, and one had a nest that nobody even knew about. We started
increasing wood duck boxes, and increasing water. The second year we had one
thousand acres of water, just from plugging ditches. When I left there, in five years, we
had three thousand acres of water on less than six thousand acres. Standing water. We
had built two or three hundred ditch plugs. And some dikes like the Stage Island dike,
because Tom Horne just kept pumping money in. All the other managers were
wondering and complaining, “Great Swamp took all our money”! And at the end of the
year if there was any money lying around, instead of buying new vehicles, it all went to
Great Swamp. I had like four assistants. I had an assistant for public use. I had an
assistant biologist. I had an assistant that ran the construction program with “Dailey”.
They buried thirty or forty homesteads. These were the days when I left there, Tom
McAndrews had paid like, twenty thousand dollars, just before I got there to get one
house put into a dumpster, and hauled away properly. Me being still the country boy,
and reckless, and getting away with murder, we had that guy with that pay loader come in
to these homesteads that were right on the paved road and we’d do it in the off season. In
the pouring rain, in the morning he’d come in and dig a pit that would be twenty feet
deep in the clay and he’d go over and “munch” that house and push it into that hole.
Then we’d burn it. It would burn all day, and at the end of the day we capped it with
clay. That was the end of it.
28
MR. STUPPS: That was it!
MR. GUVATIS: Vehicles, equipment, buildings, everything went in there. Any thing
that would burn in the fire pit went. The next day we’d be out there cranking seed on to
the little mound that was left of it. We took out paved roads that were in the wilderness.
A mile and a half of paved road was taken out because it split the wilderness in half. And
Congress told us to go and plug all the ditches so we did. We caught hell from the
Mosquito Commission, and from the neighbors and everything. With water everywhere.
It’s a wet area anyway, beyond what the refuge does.
MR. GOETTEL: But that was a good investment though. It was money well spent.
MR. GUVATIS: People couldn’t believe it. I called Tom Horne at home one day I
think. I said, “You’ve got to come down here, in the next couple of weeks, you’re not
going to believe this, we’ve put in forty-two ditch plugs. And it started to rain last
week”. It would back up behind one ditch plug, and run around through the swamp
woods to the next ditch plug, and it was just like stepping-stones. And every day I went
over there, you could find a new wetland! It was incredible! The duck weed and the
trees are starting to die by the second year. So Tom Horne came out, and he couldn’t
believe it. And Salyer had talked about Great Peace Meadows and Troy Meadows, and
Great Swamp. Great Swamp got the lowest ranking in the Service. And the region had
kind of “gone after” Great Swamp, but there was a lot of criticism from Washington
about having done that, because it was the least desirable of the three. But the potential
was there. With Horne’s help, we realized that! Nobody ever spoke poorly about Great
Swamp after that. They read the narratives with all these pictures. I’ve got aerial photos
showing all of these little ditch plugs with all of the wetlands formed behind them that are
there to this day. Roger Tory Peterson came out and was photographing. He found five
Least Bitterns in one palmett farm, that’s kind of a rare bird these days. I just got a write
up from the New Hampshire Audubon about a sighting of a Least Bittern, and they said
that every sighting in New Hampshire has to be written up. Parker River and Stage
Island had them in these impoundments and on these restored wetlands. Big places, one
hundred acres, sometime one thousand acres were full of things like Least Bitterns, and
King Rails, and Pied-Billed Grebes and Moorhens. But that’s what you get with refuges.
And without them you don’t get that kind of thing because you don’t have these big
wetlands restored. They’re all drained.
MR. STUPPS: It would be impossible to do it today.
MR. GUVATIS: Oh yeah! And the other thing is…the first year I was out there we put
fifty wood duck boxes up. We doubled the boxes every year I was there. And when I
left we had five hundred boxes and we had seven thousand eggs in those boxes that year,
seven thousand wood duck eggs. The production was in the thousands. And we had
roosts in buttonbush that had been drained for decades, if not centuries, and thousands of
ducks would pour in for ten or fifteen minutes, right at dark to these roosts. And
poachers would find them, and start shooting the hell out of them after dark. And we’d
make cases against them. But, talk about gratification, it’s just like at any place where
29
you’ve built an impoundment or restored the wetlands, it’s like that. These were drained
wetlands. These were not tidal marshes. Great Swamp was a great ditch with a lot of
agriculture. There were barbed wire fences and grazed in fallow meadow hay and all of
that stuff. Some of the neighbors almost croaked when the water started coming up, and
the cattail came in with the millets and the “smart weeds”.
MR. STUPPS: Did you flood any private property?
MR GUVATIS: A little but, but not too much. Some of the things we did would run on
other people. It was like the Everglades. A lot of it was flowing water; it was very slow
flowing sheet water. Basically, what they did in the CCC days in the 1930s, they dug
these ditches. And they went in intentionally from peninsula to peninsula in these big
swamps, and from island to island, they used the high ground. And when they went
through there, they dug these huge ditches in the clay on these islands and peninsulas.
And they took the water out of its old channels that meandered, and made them like
straight lines connecting all of these dots, the high points. We just came in with the little
tiny dozers, like a “D-2” and we could do like one or two a day. It would cost us maybe
one hundred bucks to build this thing. The next day a guy comes in with a crank seeder,
and would mulch the thing and seed it and boom, you’ve got a nice dike, or ditch plug.
We didn’t have to go in the swamp very much. Just to get from island to island. We had
a campaign, if you started in the wrong place, you couldn’t get back there again, ever.
We started way the hell up in the headwaters, as far as we could. In some of those places
we had trouble getting machinery in because it was organic. We had to go from island to
island, and we started way up and started plugging, and working our way out. We kept
doing that for two years, three year actually. Then we got into the areas with more clay.
You could just plug in there with a little dozer, and make a little barrow pit as part of the
impoundment. About one third of the plugs were extremely high, and then in some
places you would have a little low island, you would build a plug and it would go right
under. It would go right over that plug because the next one down would hold it.
Probably ever one hundred yards, or every two or three hundred yards, you had a plug or
dam. In some places there were these long, convoluted peninsulas and islands with just
this little ditch, as deep as this room going through it. It was a cinch to plug that son of a
bitch. But the Mosquito Commission was going crazy because we were flooding all this
stuff that they had been keeping drained. Most the flooding was on the Refuge. We
could basically tell when we put a plug in, if it was going to flood a guy’s sheep farm or
something. We didn’t do it until we acquired it. There are now, at Great Swamp,
hundreds of acres of wetland that have not been reclaimed because of political pressures
of killing trees and things like that. But these are vernal pools and good wetlands that
some day I hope we will still restore. There was so much water, that they said that we
didn’t need to plug every drainage ditch. To me, if you buy a drained wetland for
wildlife, you plug it! I used to argue with “ES” even. Mike Bartlett and I were good
friends, but we used to argue about the fact that this big ditch was coming out of this nice
shrub swamp, a hummock swamp, and Mike says, “it’s a good wetland, why plug the
ditch?” and I said, “Because it’s supposed to be a deep, freshwater marsh with cattail.
It’s a Least Bittern habitat, not a frog pond”. A frog pond will dry up quick. If we plug
this little ditch it will be a frog pond, which will last two months. I was just trying to
30
bring it back to what if was historically. All of these things had drainages, but they
weren’t where they dug the ditches. They dug the ditches in the easy access points in the
deep clay soil. It was very easy to undo what they did. If they had dug those ditches
along the stream channels, through the muck and swamp, then you would have had an
awful time plugging in. Then you’d need beavers. We even brought beavers in too.
MR. GOETTEL: You did?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, and they got in trouble. They immediately went to backyards
and places where they didn’t belong. They have been a big disappointment there. When I
go down there on my annual deer hunts on the refuge, when it’s open for deer hunting,
people can’t believe I go out with fifteen inch boots way into the wilderness area, and
come out with a deer. This is Lou Hines, and Al Lizgowski guys that are swamp rats,
just like me. But they can’t believe it. “You mean you went in with those boots and you
aren’t even wet? And you got to Island Pond and Fishhook Island, and you aren’t wet?”
I said, “Yeah, but I crossed on these plugs that are underwater.” The next plug down is
holding. If you know where the plug is, and don’t step off the edge into six feet of water,
it’s only this deep. [demonstrating] The deer know where they are. And I know where
they are because I built them. It’s kind of interesting.
MR. GOETTEL: And you didn’t want to go there, but you probably didn’t want to leave.
MR GUVATIS: So I was there five years, and I didn’t want to leave. Then they wanted
me to go to Parker River. I said I had already been there as a student. You don’t send
people back to where they have already been. The only thing that is really a challenge
would be Rachel Carson, and the law enforcement program. Rachel Carson or Monomoy
because they were kind of undeveloped and still growing, and the law enforcement
program were interesting to me. And besides, I said that I had always lived in refuge
housing, and I had given eighty hours a week. Me and my family, and everybody that
works for me have. If I move up here I’m going to have family and friends, and will
probably move off of the refuge. The house isn’t even on the refuge. It’s up on the north
end of the island and it’s crazy there in the summer. They told me that that was all right,
and that they only expected forty hours a week out of you. Howard Moon said that. And
I told them that they probably wouldn’t get much more than that. Because if I move off
of the refuge, I’m will have a homestead. And I’m not going to live down at Plum Island.
I don’t like too many neighbors around. I like those five thousand acres backyards that I
had been in. So anyhow, I went to Plum Island, and everybody who goes to Plum Island,
if you check the list of regional managers, ends up in the regional office, next. The only
one that broke that tradition was Jack Fillio. I tied the longevity record, which Gordon
Nightingale had set for Plum Island with eight years. But every manager from Plum
Island ended up in regional, and probably then to Washington offices in some cases. And
I didn’t like that. I was a field biologist at heart and really wanted to be out in the field.
The thing that kept me most interested, and challenged, was the law enforcement
program at Parker River. I used to go up to Rachel once a week, if I could, with Maury
and go over different units. It was fun looking at new acquisitions where you could see
boundary encroachments, and see junk on the refuge, and drainage ditches. You would
31
find places where you could store wildlife values on a piece of property that they would
pay a fortune for to buy. A place like Rachel is expensive. And Great Swamp was very
expensive land. It was relatively high end. Now it’s cheap in this day and age.
When I got to Parker River, Tom [Stupps] was there. It was very easy. Mrs. Welsh was
still there.
MR. STUPPS: She was?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah! I hired Clara Bell as a secretary. Mrs. Welsh was still there. She
retired when I was there. I remember being upset about it. But she had gotten kind of
cranky and crotchety in her older days. But going to Parker River was like going home
we were all good friends. There were Tom, and Woody, and Don I knew them all.
They all helped me get going. They helped me, and trained me and taught me. Here I
was, this young whippersnapper and I was their boss! But we got along well.
MR. STUPPS: We sure did!
MR. GUVATIS: We had a good time there. It was easy for me to concentrate on other
things because I had people like Mrs. Welsh, and Clara who had been the secretary for
the under-secretary of the Navy, and the personal secretary of Senator Tidings of
Maryland before she came to work as a clerk at Parker River! She had been a GS-9, or
higher in Washington, but her husband had retired from the Navy.
MR. STUPPS: He was a Marine. He was a Colonel in the Marine Corps.
MR. GUVATIS: They had moved up here, and she just wanted some work and boy,
what a wonderful “find” she was! She was a beautiful woman, she still is. When she
walked in all the guys were “gah-gah”. They said, “We’re going to hired this one, right?”
Her credentials were incredible, just incredible, and what a wonderful person she was and
is. She was so talented. She spoiled me rotten. You could dictate to her, she would
write your memo for you, and help you with ideas. Everything was done right,
everything. She didn’t do the bookkeeping. You, [Mr. Stupps] and Kaye Garris did that.
But Clara Bell, with the funny name, “Clara belle” being the clown on Howdy Doody,
with her name. But what a talent she was! What an asset to the refuge she was. All of
the secretaries, and clerks were like that. But she was an incredible help to me. She
made my job so much easier. And she was never compensated adequately, although we
got her raises as much as we could. And we were always struggling with “the system” to
give her awards and things. And she was so loyal and so dedicated, what a wonderful
person. Everybody loved her. She finally left, sometime after I did. She is still working
in Newburyport.
MR. STUPPS: She went back to Boston, I thought.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, you’re right. She did, but she still works in that gift shop, I
think. She was part-time, but maybe she’s given that up now.
32
Then of course, they dragged me kicking and screaming into the regional office. The
inevitable finally occurred. First I was detailed into the old post office and courthouse
building. Then out to Newton Corner, I got transferred out there finally. I was back and
forth on details in Washington. There was a fourteen-week detail in Washington.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh really? What did you do there?
MR. GUVATIS: We working on the Refuge System EIS. So I got letters in my file.
Don Young was on the task force with me. There was a whole bunch of people. Larry
Smith was a detail man. I think there were about twenty of us. We’d spend two or three
weeks at a shot in Washington. I would come home every second or third weekend.
Some people put in more time that I did. I think I put in fourteen weeks. Some people
put in thirty weeks. So finally I went to Newton Corner, and we they moved to Hadley, I
had two years to get to age fifty-five, and I had thirty-one and a half years in. I did thirty-three
and a half years, and they were offering buyouts. I was commuting back home here
to my little sanctuary, which helped me keep my sanity. This is my refuge. If I didn’t
have this backyard to play in all the years I was working in the regional office it would
have been bad. But it got so that I was only getting home on weekends because it was
two hours each way. Now I am doing a lot of consulting. They are beating me up this
year. I am two months behind trip reports. I am doing wildlife and habitat assessment
type work for the National Park Service and the [unintelligible] Watershed Association
and the Great Bay Coalition are using my reports. Bob Miller is using them with the
Nature Conservancy. They are having me look at three and four hundred acre tracks that
have three hundred perk tests on them, and they are getting ready for development. So
that’s what I’m doing now. And Tom finally retired! I couldn’t believe that he would
ever retire. And he didn’t! Then he went to work for a contractor!
MR. GOETTEL: Did you really?
MR. GUVATIS: But he finally retired from that. I think you kind of retired before, and
kept going back.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I’d go back.
MR. GUVATIS: He loves running the equipment.
MR. STUPPS: It was a good job, but like anything else you get bored with it.
MR. GUVATIS: Bored?
MR. STUPPS: When you’re running that equipment all day, every day.
MR. GUVATIS: It wasn’t building dikes and farming.
MR. STUPPS: It was good though. I enjoyed it at first.
33
MR. GUVATIS: Tom has to be busy all of the time.
MR. STUPPS: Not anymore!
MR. GUVATIS: Are you enjoying relaxing a little more?
MR. STUPPS: Yep. I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to get home.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, O.K. Do you want to get your stuff?
MR. GUVATIS: Did you have some pictures to show? Do you want something to eat?
I can fix some sandwiches or something.
[pause]
MR. GOETTEL: We’re back again. Tommy Stupps has just left. He had to take off. So
it’s just George and me. George Gavutis and Tom Goettel are here. Tommy gave us a
picture of the Essex County Sportsman’s Club. And it says “notice, any persons
connected with the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service are not welcome on these grounds
of the Essex County Sportsman’s Association”. So I’m going to take a copy of that, and
send it down to NCTC. George started talking about how they literally, gave away of
Parker River.
MR. GUVATIS: Two thirds of it actually. Tom thought that is was around thirteen
thousand acres. I know that it was between ten and twenty thousand acres. A lot if it was
proclamation type waters, and condemnation type lands because the title was so clouded
as it was in so many areas, especially way back that it was the only way that they could
put a boundary together. That sign was on the Plum Island Turnpike near the airport on
Plum Island. Everybody that drove out to Plum Island would see that sign. [referring to
Mr. Stupps’ photo] The north end of the island is all houses, and the south end is refuge.
It was before my time there, as a student. It was even before Gordon Nightingale’s time I
believe, too. Maybe it was during Gordon Nightingale’s time. He may be able to shed
more light on that. There was a lot of hostility because the government came in there. A
Federal presence wasn’t relished by a lot of the sportsman’s groups. Even though there
was hunting on forty percent of the land at some point, maybe it wasn’t right off the bat.
I can’t remember, I don’t know the history of that business. But the refuge was a more
typical refuge. It went all the way from the sea at Plum Island with the beaches and
dunes and the back salt marshes, up the Parker River. That’s where it got its name.
“Parker River National Wildlife Refuge” doesn’t fit this refuge at all. Those Parker River
wetlands went on for miles, all the way up into Georgetown, Massachusetts several miles
west of route 95, into the Crane Pond area, and across route 95 into West Newbury. It
also includes the Artichoke Reservoir area. All of these State Wildlife Management areas
that exist there now, were a part of Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. I read the
bulk of the Congressional Record with was voluminous. The refuge probably still has a
copy of it. It was piled up on top of a cabinet. There were several think bindings full of
Congressional testimony and record. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen, as
part of the Refuge System. An area that could have been protected and preserved was
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gone. At least it went to State Fish and Game departments. But it’s been totally
neglected as such, because they didn’t have the funding, or a national mission for it. The
wetlands are still drained, and over grazed or over pastured. They are still in relatively
poor condition, as far as wetland wildlife goes. Most of it’s has gone up in timber and
aren’t really managed much. If they are it is “put and take” pheasant hunting with two
sessions a day. That’s when three hundred hunters storm the place. They stock it twice a
day, and throw everybody out at noon, and then let another batch in. It’s just a kind of a
“zoo” kind of area. And the wetlands, like I said, are still mostly drained.
MR. GOETTEL: So they acquired the property in the 1930s? When did they first
acquire the land?
MR. GUVATIS: I would say it was the 1940s, but it could have been as early as the late
1930s. I think it was in 1944 as I recall. There are records that will tell you that. Gordon
Nightingale would probably know that.
MR. GOETTEL: What lead to the actual change?
MR. GUVATIS: There was a political uproar. It started with the sportsmen. When I
was there at Parker River, we were proposing a headquarters down on the island and
there were people that were in the Conservation Commission involved. There was a
judge in the area which includes the four towns that are part of the refuge, don’t quote me
on his name. He was in, I believe, Newbury. There is Newburyport, Newbury, Rowley,
and another. He went way back in this business. And his comment to me, as Refuge
Manager at the time, was that they were fighting a “stonewalling” action by us to put our
headquarters and facilities down on the island where we felt that it belonged so that we
could manage the refuge properly. He said, “We stopped you then and we’re going to
stop you now!” And this was said to me at a public meeting! Talk about being an
“obstructionist”! And talk about an “attitude” which I hadn’t even been aware of. I had
been working with people on the commissions that were more current people. But this
old guy was still there on that committee having his way with us. And as you know, we
never did built the facility down on the island. We had the BLSU money. We had the
design for it. We had the mitigation and everything we needed. We were going to tear
out goose pens, and restore dunes and do all kinds of things to buffer this thing and put it
on the backside of the barrier island. It was going to be right in the middle of the refuge,
what’s left of the refuge. Actually, Plum Island and the beach would have been a very
small and insignificant part of it. If we had held on to the fifteen or twenty thousand
acres, or what ever it was, that we had originally, it would have been more like a classic
refuge. It would have been similar to Montezuma or maybe even Great Meadows, but on
a much grander scale. This tract of a nuisance of a beach probably would have gone to
the State somehow. We would have swapped some land, or traded it, or accessed it,
because that was the least valuable property for our mission. It turns out now that the
beach now, is very important too. We ended up with a real controversial, public battle.
We fought with the public all the way to keep that open for picnicking and swimming and
having a great outside time on the shore. Unfortunately, that’s what has consumed the
refuge. And if you read the record, and having been involved with it as a student, and as
35
a manager as I was, and having been on refuges all over the country, and reading the
circulating narratives from all over the country, it’s a very unique case. It’s a case of a
refuge that almost was. They lost two thirds of that refuge! They gave it back to
landowners, and towns. They gave it to the State Fish and Game department, and
anybody that they could dump it on. They gave it back to them. In some cases, they
couldn’t even give it back to whoever claimed it because there was no clear title, so it
went to the State. And they have two people to manage eight thousand acres. And
horseback riders and mini-bikes very intensively use the land, whether legally or
illegally. It’s just not what it could have been. It could have been another great swamp
where you have tens of thousands of wood ducks being produced, and eggs being laid. It
could have been a tremendous woodcock area, or an early cessational habitat area. It had
a lot of fires. Even today it’s fairly scrubby growth, and the ground is very rocky in
places. It is also swampy in areas. There are a lot of good places for woodcock to feed
there. A lot of the uplands are “shrubby” and mushy. It has a pretty good Rough Grouse
population too. We would have had Rails, and waterfowl and a lot of migratory bird use
if it had been managed. Two thirds of is was wetland, and probably is still drained. In
some places the beaver have helped out. I remember reading the Congressional records
with the testimony of the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I also read the
testimony of the Director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and that of the mayors
of the various towns.
MR. GOETELL: How did “MASS” Audubon feel?
MR. GUVATIS: I can’t remember exactly. I think they supported us as I recall. But
there was the testimony of the Congressional people of the day. There were the Senators,
and Representatives from Massachusetts there also. But there were one or two important
political figures that were dead set against the refuge. The various groups that were
against it were cheering these figures on. It became almost like a crusade, a witch hunt
kind of a thing. It was reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. It was awful. The sad thing
is, it took away that heritage for the rest of us, forever. It’s gone! We’ll never see it
again. Parker River Refuge would have had an entirely different picture if it hadn’t
happened. What they ended up with was proclamation waters in an open bay, salt marsh,
and the barrier island beach, which was a nuisance for the most part. It sucked off
millions of dollars of refuge funds that could have gone it habitat and wildlife
management. This money went to controlling public use. If you look at the history of it
before Mr. Moses was there, and when I was there as a student with J.C. Apple, we had
picnic areas and tables with hibachis that we provided. There were lifeguards, and there
was trash collection, and all that stuff. It was a multi million-dollar operation practically
in those days. Today it would be. It didn’t cost that kind of money then. But that’s
where all of the energy for that refuge went. It drained all of the rest of the refuges in the
region, because Parker River always had this big problem. Slowly, Ed Moses and I
phased out some of it. I put up a sign that said, “Since there is trash collection, please
consider your exit fee to be one full bag of trash from the roads, dunes or beaches”, or
something like that. We took all of the barrels out. Ed Moses phased out the lifeguards
before I got there. I reduced the parking from fifteen cars to seven and oriented it around
nature trails. We tried to change the use from just pure beach recreation to bird watching
36
and things like that. The bird watchers had to compete with the beach users for parking
spaces. We tried to encourage fishing and other uses of the area. We put in boardwalks
and nature trails and stuff like that in place of the beach use. We cut way back on non-wildlife
use, through several managers. But the direction to go from the Land and Water
Recreation Fund, and the acts of Congress, was coming from Washington. The refuge
basically opened the door and said, “Please select Parker River when you open them.”
We created a real problem. There were people coming by the tens of thousands, by the
hundreds of thousands. There was at least a quarter, to a half a million visits when I was
there. Then slowly the composition changed, and it went down, down, down. The visits
now are probably around a couple hundred thousand.
MR. GOETTEL: The law enforcement component that you were talking about earlier, I
think that was an important part that was lost.
MR. GUVATIS: Really? There were three full time officers when I was there. Tony
Lejay was hired as Don Grover’s assistant. He was a full time law enforcement person
from Michigan. That’s how he got into the Fish and Wildlife Service.
MR. GOETTEL: You were saying that they had rapes, and “B and E” [breaking and
entering] rings there.
MR. GUVATIS: In one year, we broke five “B and E” rings. It was unbelievable! We
had hundreds and hundreds of cars that were broken into, and smashed. The windshields
would be smashed, and whatever valuables left in them, were stolen. People commonly
left their valuables, on a beach situation, with sand and salt water, in their vehicles. So it
was a perfect setup for these thugs. Every year we would clean them out and new ones
would start. There would be a rash of them. We would develop a “M.O” [modus
operandi] and go after them, and we would finally catch them. But it took a lot of effort
with the help of the local police. When I did my “6-C” write up for Parker River, it was
incredible compared to what most refuge managers would be able to put down. We had
State Deputy credentials. We had full Massachusetts State Police powers, as deputy
“CO”. That was the authority that came with that. We had that kind of capability. We
didn’t go arresting people out on the highways and everything. The State Police do that.
But we had the same authority as the State Police of Massachusetts, in addition to our
Federal credentials. We were running radar, and doing drug tests, and all of those
sophisticated police type stuff. There were hundreds of cases involving drugs ever year.
It was nothing to have a thousand cases in a year, and prosecute maybe five hundred.
When I did my “6-C” stuff that was the kind of thing that Don Grover was involved in.
There was a tremendous caseload, and it was dangerous.
MR. GOETTEL: Mr. Grover had a whole closet of weapons that he had taken away from
people. One time, I took away a hockey stick with a nail in it. There were pipes and
anything that you could imagine would be used as a weapon.
MR. GUVATIS: There were all kinds of drug paraphernalia that you couldn’t even
imagine, and weapons of all types. There were machetes and bayonets and pistols and
37
sawed off shotguns found. You name it, and it was there! We had some real harrowing
experiences down there, Grover, and Moses, and I. There was no back up for a while. It
was just Grover for a while, and then we got him an assistant. There were Tony Lejay,
and Chris Shotmeyer. Now Chris works for the Marine Fisheries. Billy Capulious was
his assistant for a while also. All of these people did law enforcement full time. We had
a pubic use specialist who for nine months of the year was basically a full time law
enforcement person. He did the brochures, and other things, but he did that too. And
then, there was me. I can’t remember what my estimates were, but it was probably
twenty-five to fifty percent during some of my tenure there. I got to a point where I
didn’t want to be in court all of the time. So whenever I could, I called in the full time
law enforcement people to handle the situations that I ran into. Then I would just in as a
witness if I had to. They would make the actual arrests. We made real arrests! We had
to handcuff people. We had people who were fighting us. We carried mace spray and
batons before the Service, before anybody! We were the police down there! It was very
easy to make a case. Down at Great Swamp we had a lot of trouble more trouble than
normal. There were problems there with vandalism, and drugs there. It wasn’t as bad as
it was at Parker River but people in this part of the country, that stayed on refuges in the
east, especially near the beaches were heavily into law enforcement, especially at Parker
River. The Agents were making cases, but they were slowly moving into more
investigative work. They were management enforcement agents. They were up there in
the summer “ banding” too. Our guy was on the beach busting up drunken parties and
drug orgies, and that kind of thing. The life threatening part of law enforcement was
much more real for Don Grover than it was for most Fish and Wildlife law enforcement
agents. Wally Ciroca really went after it. He got into some situations were there were
drugs and ivory and other things. And there was some undercover stuff as well. They
could have easily gotten killed doing that. Grover this kind of potential, you know how
dangerous car stops are at especially at night and alone. He had motorcycle gangs
surround him with chains and whips and everything else. Moses would arrive on the
scene from his residence up on the island, and the Police would roll in right after that.
All kinds of things could have happened. There were murders, and attempted murders
and rapes. There were a lot of rapes every year reported. And there were probably a lot
that were not reported. There were assaults, and all kinds of crazy stuff. Then we had
wildlife violations. People would steal goose broods and put them in the back of their hot
station wagon to roast. I have pictures in one of my narrative reports of goslings in the
back of a station wagon. There was a lot of drug stuff. You would smell marijuana, or
see paraphernalia at the gate, or on a routine stop for speeding. We were all trained radar
operators. I took a Doppler radar course. We had a guy come up and teach us how to do
it. We had people who were driving sixty or seventy miles an hour who said it was the
best way to get over. You could just touch the tops of the hills! You can just imagine the
cloud of dirt and gravel that they would spew out. Not only was it bad for the
environment because of the gravel drifting out over the marsh, and it had to be replaced.
Gravel is a non-renewable resource. There would be people run off of the road. There
would be hit and run incidents. We had everything! If you read my “6-C” file you would
see all this stuff in there, and it not made up! It’s true! Moses’ and Grover’s were the
same way.
38
MR. GOETTEL: It’s funny, because when I worked at Great Meadows people used to
talk about going to Plum Island. I’d say, “Do you mean Parker River?” they would say
“No, we’re going to Plum Island”.
MR. GUVATIS: They called in the “Park” at Plum Island. They didn’t even know what
was there. They would call it “the wildlife”. They never knew what it was. We had
signs everywhere, and uniforms. We are always “the Rangers”. We had to get air
conditioning for our guys. They would be down on the beach, these “greenheads” and
they would be trying to maintain composure in ninety to one hundred degree heat! They
had to deal with violations. And they are being chewed out because they had the
windows rolled down in those dark green pickups that were like a Venus flytrap. It was
interesting.
MR. GOETTEL: You were talking about Jay Clark Salyer going through New Jersey.
MR. GUVATIS: Jay Clark Salyer went to all of these refuges.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, I know. Did he do Parker River too?
MR. GUVATIS: My understanding was that he hand picked, and selected all of these
places himself. It was him and Ding Darling, and maybe other people too. It was such a
small outfit then, that everybody knew each other, and they all reported directly to Salyer.
Salyer drove all over the country so I am sure that he was at Parker River. I heard that in
New Jersey he looked at Great Peace, Meadows, Troy Meadows and Great Swamp. All
of this was glacial lake, Passaic, or the basin. He, or somebody with him made the
comment that they felt that Great Swamp was the least desirable. Mainly because it has
more upland dispersed in it. And it had been more subject to settlement and because it
wasn’t all pure wetland. Where as Great Peace was kind of in between, and Troy
Meadows was mostly deep, freshwater marsh, when restored. It was all deep cattail
marsh and it was probably loaded with Rails, and Least Bitterns, and Pied-billed Grebes,
and Moorhens, and all of the threatened species you have now in New Jersey and New
England. They were all there on their own. Although they had made attempts at
drainage, it took very little restoration, if any to see the wildlife values of those places.
But looking at Great Swamp, it was a bunch of farms, woodlots, and wet fields. They
bedded all of the fields down there. I see it everywhere I go now I put it in all of my
reports. They plowed year after year after year, from the same spot, into the middle and
then they would come around to the other side. Plowing with a land plow formed those
ditches. They’ll start plowing to the right, and they’ll throw everything to the right, and
the last furrow that was left was a ditch. They kept doing this every year. If it were very
wet, they would do it every fifteen or twenty feet. On the raised areas, or mounds, they
would plant. Every one of these little beds ends up being a swale. It had vegetation and
water standing in it. Usually it’s done on clay soils. I found a lot of that on Faletts’s
Brook that flows into Langford River and into the Great Bay estuary system. Then it
reverts into brush as they abandon it and it’s hard to even detect it in the woods. There
are trees and logs that have fallen across it. But basically it is still there. That’s what
they did at Great Swamp. It just like New England, it was cleared. It was grassland, and
39
wet grass and tall meadow hay. Great Meadows has at least two or three hundred acres
of continuous wetland, maybe four of five hundreds. Real wetlands, with buttonbush and
deep, fresh water marsh, were there. There were a lot of marginal areas where one or two
inches of relief would make the difference between a hickory tree or a gum tree or a
buttonbush plant. The relief was that much. It’s so flat. It was like the Everglades as far
as the system, when it was all plugged up and restored it was sheet water, in some places
a half a mile, or a mile wide. It would just weave through the area, and it slows it down.
Going through the saw grass in the Everglades is just like going through the cattails and
other stuff here. It impedes the flow, and holds the water level up as long as it rains
every few weeks. Then, if you put some dikes or dams like we did at Great Swamp, in
addition, to regulate it even further. It’s incredible how much water you get there. You
would get a puddle on your front lawn because its clay. And if it rains a lot and the water
stands you can get mosquitoes hatching out of it. This could happen in a deer hoof print,
or a heal print! So Great Swamp ended up being quite a good selection as a refuge. The
region has apparently been on the defensive before my time, before I got there. Dick
Rigby was the first manager there. Then Tom McAndrews was there briefly as an
assistant. Tom came from an education background. He had come from a school. He
was a schoolteacher kind of guy. He probably had a biology degree. They were trying to
get anybody they could to go there. I was very offended when they asked me to go there
because it had a kind of a reputation. It was like the beach at Parker River. I got into this
for wildlife management, not people management! And not to do all this draining of
wetlands. And Great Swamp was full of homesteads. There were hundreds and hundreds
of homesteads that we basically acquired one way or the other. When the wilderness
came on, there was a big push to clean up all of these homesteads, and rip out the roads
and plug the ditches and pull out all of the pipes. They wanted to dam up all of the
ditches too. We did it, and what a wonderful thing it was for a while. We made it kind a
jewel. I think Salyer by that time was long dead. But people said that Salyer would
reconsider if he sees it as it was today.
MR. GOETTEL: The other ones that you mentioned, like Troy Meadows, have they
been protected at all?
MR. GUVATIS: They were all protected. In fact, we had Ralph Andrews, he’s another
one that you could talk to. He was at Patuxent, and was the manager at Troy Meadows.
It was maybe a federal entity then, I think it was one of those areas that we had dual
control over. Ralph Andrews could probably tell you more about it. It was actually a
satellite, or small refuge for a while under some written agreement, I don’t know what.
Or it could have been that it was signed over the Service to another agency. I know that
Wild Preserves, Inc., a private group, bought most of Troy Meadows, and a good bit of
Great Peace Meadows. They didn’t have the funding that a federal agency could have
brought into it. The condemnation potential to round out the acquisition, even if the title
was parleyed, they couldn’t go to court and condemn. Even if nobody knew who owned
it, they couldn’t get it. Then they turned around, and became our enemy up at Great
Swamp because people were donating land, or they bought it for a pittance, this Wildlife
Preserves, Inc. Miller could fill you in on that story because he was a realty officer. We
were then blackballed by Wildlife Preserves, Inc. because they wanted one hundred
40
thousand dollars for a piece of land that they got for nothing which was suppose to go to
us in the first place. But the people didn’t realize that we were not all the same, so they
deeded it to them. They ended up with two thousand acres of Great Swamp. Some of it
we condemned, and some of it we just did without. It was a shame, that’s kind of another
area where we didn’t get what we should have gotten. Although I think that slowly we
have gotten most of it. Some of it may have been sold for a subdivision and that kind of
thing. But that’s another story where the Refuge System didn’t get its due. Most refuges
were pretty clear-cut, and clean. We had some real tragedies in this region. Parker River
is the one that comes to mind the most. We actually had it in our hot little hands for a
decade, and then it got axed. They wrote it out, and gave it back to the Indians and the
State, and whoever else claimed it. They put us down in a little cubbyhole.
MR. GOETTEL: I heard that they did that at Monomoy too, with Morris Island.
MR. GUVATIS: Did they?
MR. GOETTEL: It wasn’t Monomoy itself, but Morris Island.
MR. GUVATIS: Maybe it was a trend in Massachusetts at the time. A precedent was
established somewhere. It was probably in Massachusetts mostly, and maybe a little bit
in New Jersey too. All those of those other wetlands that I mentioned north of Great
Swamp, are part of the Glacier Lake Passaic, which is like twenty-five miles long and
was a big glacier lake. They all have clay bottoms, and deep muck, and peat and soils
overlaying. They have a lot of water, and a lot of wetlands with poor drainage. I could
still and talk at length about all this stuff. But there is a lot of history in those narrative
reports. And as the Wildlife Manager at Great Swamp, I have several of the narratives
that were written. They were kind of legends in their own time, because they were
written in the 1970s and late 1960s. We were the first ones to put color photography into
them. Some people thought that this was inappropriate, and that it was all supposed to be
in black and white. They said that it shouldn’t look like a magazine. It should look like a
dull, dry paper. I got letters from Noble Buell who was the assistant Director saying that
he wanted to congratulate you people from Region five, and thank the Refuge Manager
for providing a readable document that was interesting. It had a little bit of humor here
and there, and there was photography all though it, illustrating the ditch plug, and the
wetland restoration, or the deer-poaching problem. It was like National Geographic
magazine, almost! Some of the pictures we had were really good! I used to carry a three
hundred, and a four hundred millimeter camera in my suitcase in the car. And in between
my residence on the refuge and the office, I would get incredible photo opportunities
about once a month along the side of the road. Maybe there would be a short-eared owl
that was very tame, or a big buck standing there because he was crazy for the rut. I used
to walk the nature trails, and we had observation blinds. At the residence at the refuge,
right out of the window, we saw the first Yellow-headed Blackbird, the first one in New
Jersey in sixty years! He was sitting at the bird feeder in the cherry tree. We could get
pictures like that without a lot of effort, and we would put them in the narrative. One of
our assistants did a thing on Monarchs, and showed the chrysalis, and the egg, and the
larvae and the pupae. We had pictures of Monarch on Asters. When were getting RBUs,
41
we had a RBU for every Monarch butterfly, and we had millions of them. We were the
most valuable refuge in the country! [laughing] That was in the old PPBE days, when
we went through all of these budgetary things.
MR. GOETTEL: I was up at Moosehorn then, and we put down clams, you know.
Somebody made us stop doing that. The worst part about the clams though was that there
were two reasons why they should be in it. First of all, there were a lot of clam diggers.
That was a big thing in ‘down east” Maine, and still is today. The other thing is that all
of the Eiders would come in there, and the Sea Ducks too. And what do they eat? They
eat the clams and mussels and things like that. So this was probably one of the things
that you should include.
MR. GUVATIS: We all got caught up in that. I think that most of us bought into it. It
ate us up for like a year or two. It was just like the “sick sea” thing we just went through
last winter putting that back together from ancient history. But yeah, we did have some
interesting times on these refuges. No doubt about it! I was only at Great Swamp for
like five years. When I moved there from Iroquois, we did a “first”. There was a refuge
house at Iroquois my position and McAndrews’ position occupied. He was at Great
Swamp as acting Manager in the Refuge Manager’s house, and I was in the assistant
Manager’s house at Iroquois, and we swapped. The mover said that he would never do it
again. But he packed us up at Iroquois, and drove us down. Then they had to pack up all
of McAndrews’ stuff and get it out before they could move us in. And they still had to
turn around and go back with McAndrews’ stuff. We swapped houses. That was a first,
I think. We all worked for “Smitty”. If you didn’t work for Larry Smith in those days,
when Moses, McAndrews, and I were coming up through the ranks. You had to work for
Larry Smith before you could get your own station. Before you really went anywhere.
You were nobody until you worked for Larry Smith. He was the premier refuge manager
in the region according to Tom Horne who was the supervisor. He thought the world of
Larry Smith. “Smitty” was a very thorough and detailed person. He has impeccable
records on everything. He was quite a filmmaker too. He made these night-lighting
films, and some others also. He didn’t make the ones from Great Swamp, but he did the
one at Montezuma and Iroquois. We used to have all of this dead timber there, and we
used to go up and put up these chicken wire baskets, hummock nests we called them. We
would nail them into the crotches of the timber on the ice. We would put up these
“chicken baskets” and fill them with hay. And Mallards and Black ducks used an
incredible number of them. And even Red Heads used them. Even Pintails would use
them. But then the raccoons would catch on. We also had a toxic egg program. We used
to take eggs for free from the Pheasant farm at Iroquois. There was this little drill similar
to what a Dentist would have. You would cut out a little flap on the egg. And then drop
a strychnine pellet in each one, and wax it over with a candle. We would put two or three
in a clutch. It was very selective, out over the water. The only thing we ever got with it
was a raccoon, or maybe a mink. That was a way that we did predator control. It
actually improved the waterfowl population as a result. But those are days that are gone
forever. I can remember another situation when we had the same kind of eggs at Parker
River, and the biologist used them. Some of this you may not want to use, but it is
interesting. It shows the environmental impact we might have had in some cases. When
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the word came out that agent orange was bad, that it had dioxin in it, it got buried in
plastic bags in some cases. Maps were drawn to show where it was. The Biologist at
Parker River took the strychnine that we had. We decided that the toxic egg thing was
something that we shouldn’t be doing anymore because an eagle got killed somewhere.
He took it down to the beach, of the Atlantic Ocean and “cast it upon the waters”,
thinking that the dilution would be incredible, and it would be gone. About three hours
later a message came on the radio, “There’s dead Sanderlings all over the place”!
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GUVATIS: And this guy was really sensitive. He was so upset. He almost died of
a heart attack when he heard this! What it had done was to get into the shrimp, and the
stuff at the tide line. The little shrimp, and the copepods and all that stuff had ingested it
and the Sanderlings ate them and boom. It just goes to show you that when you create
these toxins and don’t realize what they can do, it can be bad. Nobody intended anything
bad to happen as a result of it but I’m sure that a lot of it happened. Every refuge had it’s
own dynamite shed. It was basically a pillbox in the ground, lined with cement. You
kept dynamite in there, which changes composition and create more and more
nitroglycerin. It gets every unstable, and that’s kind of what we had on every refuge.
MR. GOETTEL: Up at Moosehorn they would get it from Georgia Pacific. And I don’t
know what Georgia Pacific was doing with it.
MR. GUVATIS: They probably used it to blow log jams on the rivers when they were
doing river drives of timber.
MR. GOETTEL: They would keep it through the expiration date and then give it to the
game wardens and the wildlife preserves.
MR. GUVATIS: Maybe they thought we could blow up beaver dams with it! We used it
to blast ditches with it, and potholes. But ammonium nitrate was far more effective.
When the military seized upon it, they called it a “cratering charge”. They used it to
destroy airfields or landing strips that we were either abandoning during the war, or that
we wanted to destroy so that the enemy couldn’t use them. You could just fill it full of
twenty-five foot wide, eight-foot deep craters. It would neutralize anyone’s ability to
land a plane on it. We just took it from there, and used our own ammonium nitrate
fertilizer and fuel oil in bags with a blasting cap in it. You had a hell of a lethal explosive
that you could make nice round holes in the march with. Every one of them was a
breeding pair habitat site. It was great! And if you ever drained the areas, you had
reservoirs for fish and stuff if you wanted them. If you didn’t, you still had them. If carp
got in there, you’d never get rid of them unless you treated every hole. Would you like a
drink or something to eat? I must be getting hungry.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a glass of water or something. That would be
great.
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MR GUVATIS: [voice fades as he walks away] I’ve got lemonade and grape mix or
something like that. I also have milk, and ice water. . .

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INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE GAVUTIS, JR. AND TOMMY STUBBS
BY THOMAS GOETTEL, AUGUST 30, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: Today is August 30, 2000 and we are in Kensington, New Hampshire
with George Gavutis. We are at George’s house and we’re also talking to Tommy
Stubbs. Tommy worked at Parker River for quite some time on the Maintenance staff?
MR. STUBBS: Yes, on the Maintenance staff.
MR. GOETTEL: He was the head of the Maintenance department. We thought we’d get
together here today and talk a bit about their careers with the Fish and Wildlife Service,
in the Division of Refuges. George, you are from right around this area aren’t you?
Aren’t you from New Hampshire?
MR. GAVUTIS: Massachusetts.
MR. GOETTEL: Lawrence, Massachusetts?
MR. GAVUTIS: Lowell.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, ok, Lowell, Mass. How did you get started with your career with
the Division of Refuges?
MR. GAVUTIS: I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in the back in the
late 1950s and 1960s and I got hired as a student assistant, which was a summer program
at Parker River. The manager of it was J. C. Apple at the time, and that’s when I met
Tom. And Woody Sears, and Harry Sears were all there then I believe. Tom was the
maintenance foreman, either then or thereafter at some point, and ran that part of the
program. I worked there for three summers, and went back to school in the fall. When I
graduated worked there during the fall, and then I went in the Military for a while.
MR. GOETTEL: In what branch?
MR. GAVUTIS: I went into the Army Reserves for six months. I was down at Fort Dix
for eight weeks of basic training, and then went to meetings on weekends and summers
for about eight years thereafter, because I jumped around a lot in the Army.
MR. GOETTEL: So, did you go to UMASS in wildlife, was what your major?
MR. GAVUTIS: Yes, Wildlife Management. I was under Professor Tripanzi, and Dr.
Sheldon, who was the woodcock person.
MR. GOETTEL: What a character!
MR. GAVUTIS: What a guy! And then, Fred Greeley, I believe took over up there. I
kept coming back to Parker River. J. C. Apple had me doing the cratering charge, you
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know, blowing potholes with Army. And then he tried to make the regional blasting
expert. In fact, I still have my Blaster’s Handbook, and all this. I went up to
Montezuma, which was my first assignment. We started mixing ammonium nitrate and
fuel oil, which is the cause of the demise of some buildings as you may recall recently out
in Kansas City [referring to Oklahoma City Federal Building]. My father used to talk
about the Texas City fire on the coast of Texas, when a big ship caught fire, and
exploded. It was like at atomic bomb had gone off down there. So when I was working
with this stuff, he was nervous. I was nervous too. We used blasting caps and detonating
cord, which you could wrap around a tree and cut the tree right off! We used that to blow
these potholes. We’d mix fifty pound bags, in plastic, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and
diesel fuel. Then we’d stick a blasting cap in, or “det cord” in and dig a hole and through
it in, and blow- holes. In the marsh, basically it was kind of a prelude to open marsh
water management. It was basically putting deep- water sumps in the upland edge, or the
high part of the marsh, where the mosquitos’ breed, and the minnows couldn’t get, except
during extreme tides, and they couldn’t stay there. They’d come out with the tides, and
couldn’t eat the mosquitoes. So that’s why the mosquito breeding was so bad.
We went over the Nelson’s Island.
MR. STUMP: We’ve got pictures of those.
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah, I’ve got all that.
MR. GOETELL: We just had a battery failure. So George you were talking about
blasting. Doing your blasting. Tommy, you mentioned having pictures. And there were
some narrative reports?
MR. GAVUTIS: There was actually a Cratering Charge Report filed, and I have that on
file. With the black and white photos of the geysers, and maybe some colored photos
too. If again, you can’t find it at the Refuge, or it isn’t available, I have all that stuff. I
have a lot of the narrative reports too.
MR. GOETTEL: I’ll look into the Narratives, because they are supposed to be archived.
So, if they are archived somewhere in the official government archives we’ll be all set.
Maybe we can at least take a copy of some of your other stuff. And maybe sometime this
winter when you’re looking through your memorabilia, and if you think of it, just set
some stuff aside, and I would be glad to make copies of it. We certainly don’t want to
take the original copies from you guys. Whatever, you’d like to see put in the archives.
Because that’s the type of stuff that will meant a lot. So much of the time we are always
reinventing the wheel, and so much of this stuff gets lost. You started talking George,
about going to the different stations, you were the regional blasting guy?
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: You went to a whole bunch of different stations?
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MR. GAVUTIS: J.C. Apple said, “you are a new employee, and the best way to fame
and fortune is to be an expert in something. You would get to see the whole region, I
think we should designate you the regional blasting expert”. I guess I knew as much
about ammonium nitrate as anybody, or more. The military came out with the crater
charges first, from Fort Dix. And they did them at Parker River during the first stage.
After that we just built our own components. We’d get heavy- duty plastic bags, and
you’d buy ammonium nitrate fertilizer at Agway, or wherever, I guess they had Agway
then. And then a certain proportion of diesel fuel was added. We used to stir it up. We
actually did it in the bags. They were very tough bags. I can’t remember what we’d use
for a paddle. We would pour the diesel fuel on the “pril” ammonium nitrate. It looked
like little beads, or circles. It would soak up the diesel in just the right proportion. It
would soak down through and as I recall, we either sloshed the bags around, or stirred it.
Then you insert a piece of the detonating cord or a blasting cap into the bag. Then you
just tied the end, or taped the bag shut. We’d dig a hole, two or three feet deep with a
posthole digger. Usually it was in organic soils, there in the marsh, so it was pretty easy
digging once you got through the sod. Then you’d bury this thing, and you’d do a whole
series of them. Then you would evacuate the area, and touch it off with a detonator,
electrically, or you’d light the detonating cord. I really was nervous about all of that!
Thinking that you could get blown up here you know! This was serious stuff! [laughing]
But it was very exciting and interesting and scary when that stuff went off! You wanted
to be well away. Chunks of mud, and pieces of clams shells, and rocks went way up in
the air. The narrative pictures, and that report that I did were replete with pictures of
these blasts, and the craters that resulted.
MR. STUBBS: We even got some aerial views.
MR. GAVUTIS: We had aerial views, like Tom said, that looked like a moonscape right
afterwards. But the stuff kind of melts down, and you end up with these fairly clean
looking areas.
MR. GOETTEL: It would be interesting to see what it looks like now from the air.
MR. GAVUTIS: Yeah. We took pictures when I went back to Parker River as the
manager, many years later. We did a survey there. They were still there. You could see
the rings. They were on the latest aerials that the SCS would take every few years.
MR. STUBBS: But they had filled in some.
MR. GAVUTIS: They filled in depth wise. That happened pretty quickly, within a year
or two. Because the tides would come in and out, the debris around the edges kind of
melts down, and they may have been more that four feet. But they ended up around three
or four feet deep. But then they didn’t change. I was the manager in the early 1970s and
they were blasted in the early 1960s, around 1962, right around the time I was graduating
from the University of Massachusetts, before I went into the Army for a while. They had
already mellowed by then, and had re-vegetated. But the rings, the circles are still there.
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I don’t know how they are now. It’s been fifteen or twenty years since I was at Parker
River as the manager.
MR. GOETTEL: But they were there then?
MR. GUVATIS: Oh, they were. That was the interesting thing. It was kind of like
killing a fly with a sledgehammer, but the basic premise was to super-saturate the upland
edges to keep the mosquitoes from breeding, where the minnows can’t live and linger
long enough to control the population of mosquito larvae with these sumps and reservoirs
that will hold these minnows. And every time it rains hard or a tide seeps in a little bit,
they immediately go out from these reservoirs and then they can retreat back into them.
They aren’t picked off by birds, or stranded, or have to go back to sea, where ever they
have to go to keep up with the water, because they have a little sump there that they live
in.
MR. STUBBS: Now, was it done mostly for mosquitoes?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah. I always felt that it was. When we did it some of the marches,
we did it in dense areas. When we did it in Montezuma it was actually more for habitat
interspersion. Habit improvement, because we went into dense cattail stands. There was
some mosquito problem, but it was really to break up the marsh, and breeding ponds.
That’s a good question Tom. But at Parker River, it was. At least, I felt it was. Because I
studied the mosquitoes as part of my student assistant duties for the summer before we
did it. I logged, and basically marked all of the breeding spots with stakes. I remember
having lathe, or construction stakes. And we dug a hole underneath each one of those
stakes and blew a big hole. In some places there were like four or five in a row that
almost touched each other. And then there would be a big gap, because there would be
no breeding there. Then there would be one here, and one there. I could dig out those
photos, it wouldn’t take long, before you left today, although, my house is upside down
with the renovations here. So I shouldn’t say that. I know about where they are.
MR. GOETTEL: You say that it was overkill. But, these days we’ve got all of that ultra
low ground pressure equipment that you didn’t have back then. So it was probably the
best way to get the job done.
MR. GAVUTIS: We did other things, too. Tom had an “OC-6” and an “OC-3” at Parker
River with cleat tracks, old crawlers. They don’t even make that stuff any more. That
stuff could practically run over your foot in the marsh, and not hurt you. But, when I was
the manager there, with Bill Faller there as the biologist, we bought a backhoe unit for
that “OC-6”. The problem was that it didn’t have enough reach. It wasn’t a big enough
machine. The ones that they are using now are much bigger machines with some reach to
them. You can do the same thing with these very low ground pressure excavators now,
much faster. What are you talking about for a price tag on one of those things, a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars?
MR. STUPPS: One hundred and fifty, to two hundred thousand dollars.
5
MR. GAVUTIS: So, still there still may be some application for the blasting technique.
I wrote up a paper on it. Like I said for this study. A report. And it went on. After that I
oversaw at Montezuma and Bombay Hook, and Brigantine, I did Brigantine too, off the
north dike at Brigantine. Mostly salt marsh stuff though, except for Montezuma. Then
other Refuges, more and more, picked up on it. It wasn’t that complicated a technique.
And they either had the National Guard, like up at Iroquois, and Great Meadows got into
it too.
MR. STUPPS: The reason why I think Parker River got into mosquito control was when
the land was taken, Fish and Wildlife Service went on record, saying that we would
contribute toward mosquito abatement.
MR. GUVATIS: We were committed.
MR.STUPPS: As a matter of fact, we used to buy DDT. I think we had one thousand
dollars, which was a lot of money back then, each year for DDT. We’d buy as many as
ten, fifty-five gallon barrels of 25% DDT. We would give it to the State and they would
aerial spray around the perimeter of the refuge.
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember the last time they did that. I was a student there. And
there was an encephalitis scare that year. It was in August or early September and they
sprayed. They weren’t supposed to spray in the impoundments but they did that year. In
fact, I don’t think we gave them that DDT. I think the Governor mobilized the National
Guard and everything else because there was such a health crisis. A couple of people had
died. So, they were going up in these big transport planes. They were big planes, I
remember seeing them, flying wing-to-wing, going right up Plum Island sound. But they
also sprayed the impoundment, so it killed all of the white perch. We had a big white
perch die off that year.
MR. STUPPS: I remember that year.
MR. GUVATIS: That was my recollection. I wasn’t in charge of the Refuge or anything
else then. I was just a student, but I reported on my findings. I remember that “J.C.”
[Apple] was pretty concerned or upset that they had sprayed the impoundment, and that
they hadn’t really talked to us, or got our permission, or coordinated the spraying of the
marsh. It was about the time that DDT banned. Rachel Carson’s studies were coming
out in her books and everything, and we had lost all of our ospreys and eagles nesting on
the east coast. So it was about that time that it shut down. I think it was 1960 or 1959 I
would guess, that I was there as a student. And that was probably the end of it, the end of
DDT. I am surprised that it went that long. When you think now, that wasn’t that long
ago. When you think of it, it was one hundred years ago when they sprayed 100% DDT,
and agent orange. When I was as Iroquois Refuge, which was my third assignment,
which would have made it in the mid 1960s, for a month, I sprayed agent orange on
boundaries with a pumper unit. I was in an old command car, just going along spraying
boundaries with agent orange. Then, a few years later, I was at another Refuge, and
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Larry Smith was still at Iroquois, everything refuge did it, it was what we did. When I
was at Parker River, they had me experimenting with bait. No, it wasn’t bait. It was
“urea ” soil sterilant that I was doing. They said the side effects would be equivalent to
taking an aspirin. You didn’t have to wear a mask or anything. I was going into these
cattail stands with a cyclone seeder and it would just bounce back at you after hitting this
wall of cattails. For quite a few years, that strip of cattails staid there. We used to take
pictures of them. If we had put it on by plane, it probably would have been better. It was
a soil sterilant.
MR. STUPPS: It worked pretty well too.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, it kept in open. We were trying to make openings in the cattail,
because it was a very shallow marsh. Cattail then, was like “loostrife, and fragmities” is
now it was kind of a noxious weed in that concentration.
MR. STUPPS: I remember that you had the “cattail crusher” when you were a student,
I’ve got a picture of that.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, but you made it. Oh had it stuck in a hole. Those picture are all
in the narratives with the big OC-6 stuck up in the air and you guys trying to pull me out,
because I had fallen into one of the holes with it. These were some interesting photos of
personnel in action!
MR. STUPPS: The narrative reports were really good back then.
MR. GUVATIS: They were.
MR. STUPPS: Do they still have the Refuge report?
MR. GOETTEL: Well, we do. We’re supposed to, but for five or so years there wasn’t a
lot of …stations just didn’t do them. But we’re getting back into doing them now. I’ll
tell you, it was the biggest tragedy, not to do the narrative reports.
MR. GUVATIS: There are some gaps there now. Some of the stations are backed up a
couple of years. Some years will never get done, with personnel changes and things like
that.
MR. GOETTEL: And all of that is lost. I remember the first thing you used to do when
you got to a new station was to sit down and read the narratives.
MR. STUPPS: Absolutely, absolutely!
MR. GUVATIS: What a wealth of information! And you wouldn’t have to reinvent the
wheel at the field level anyways. I think that a lot of the “reinventing the wheel” stuff
that you talked about was budgetary stuff. We went through budgetary crisis and
exercises. They call it “ZBB” and all these names. Every administration that came in
7
had a new idea about how to track your finances and get budgeted for funding, and going
to Congress. That, and the political change in the Service, every time the administration
changes, or there is an election, it changes. There has been a lot of stability at the refuge
level, except on the supervisory end of things kind of fell apart at some point along the
way. There was no guidance from Washington down. It used to be, in the days of Jay
Cox Salyer and the early days, there was a real Service hierarchy just like there would be
in the military, all the way down through. That pride kind of filtered up and down the
tree. I can remember that even in my tenure the Washington office was just basically
emasculated. And even the regions! It became almost like the refuge managers had total
control of the programs. And sometimes that was fine and good, and sometimes it
wasn’t. Some managers needed or wanted some guidance. They weren’t all experienced
in every area. And I would hope that someday that this turns around again.
MR. STUPPS: One thing I remember from when I first started to work was that the
regional refuge supervisor would come out and did inspections. Each vehicle was
inspected, and they even went as far and to inspect the residents.
MR. GUVATIS: They inspected the logbooks.
MR. STUPPS: I remember George Spinner. I guess his wife didn’t keep a very clean
house. Erase that, I guess I shouldn’t say that! They used to inspect everything!
MR. GUVATIS: Even the quarters. They’d tell you that they needed to see the quarters,
and “what would be the best time?” And they would come and look at it. The log books,
the vehicles and the tractors, everything. That’s the way it was when I started. Mert
Radway was the assistant supervisor, and Tom Horne was the supervisor. But that kind
of thing would come and go a bit. I remember when Tom McKantor, Ed Moses, and I
were the three supervisors for the region. We did conduct some inspections of that type.
We would bring a person from CGS sometimes, on the team when we did the station
inspections. Every five years we’d do every station. So it would go in a five-year cycle.
Someone would concentrate on the books, some on budget and finance. Someone from
personnel would concentrate on the personnel actions and interview all of the staff. I
don’t know if you ever got called into one of those, but they’d actually bring each staff
member in by themselves and talk to you. That was probably in the early 1980s when I
was still around. Then it kind of went away after that.
MR. STUPPS: Oh yeah, I remember those! When Arthur Miller was the Regional
Refuge Supervisor, his big thing was that all of the tracks had to be tight on all of the
dozers. We didn’t really believe that it was that important. And I remember that one
time when he came out I took wood on a sprocket and backed a machine up to tighten the
tracks. If he had ever looked to see how those tracks were tight, but they were tight!
MR. GUVATIS: But how were they tight? [all laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: Tommy, where are you from originally? How did you get involved in
the Fish and Wildlife Service?
8
MR. STUPPS: Delaware was where I got involved in the government. I was looking for
a job. I had just gotten out of the military.
MR. GOETTEL: What branch were you in?
MR. STUPPS: The Navy.
MR. GOETTEL: How long were you in?
MR. STUPPS: A year and a half.
MR. GOETTEL: That must have been after World War II.
MR. STUPPS: No, I was in World War II. I was in the Philippines when the war ended.
I came out, and I was looking for a job, and I went over to see the Refuge Manager, and I
got hired.
MR. GAVUTIS: This was in Maryland?
MR. STUPPS: Delaware, at Bombay Hook.
MR. GAVUTIS: You’re from Maryland or Delaware?
MR. STUPPS: I was born in Maryland. And George Spinner was the Refuge Manager,
he asked me to fill out a form. “Key” Wallace was at Blackwater then, he would come
over and help us on a job, and he was going to loose a maintenance man. He said he
would hire me if I could get on the list. I filled out the application and sent it in, and they
offered me the job up at Parker River. So in 1947, I went to Parker River.
MR. GAVUTIS: But you started down there, you actually worked down there?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I worked at Bombay Hook as a laborer for seventy-one cents an
hour.
MR. GAVUTIS: As a temporary?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, ok. When I came up here I earned twenty-two hundred dollars a
year. I was a CTC-5 for some reason. Then in 1951, I got on permanent. But I got my
law enforcement authority in 1949. It don’t seem that they would have given it to me,
but I looked at it just recently.
MR. GAVUTIS: Well, they were pretty casual. The further back you go, the more
casual it was! “Here’s your badge. Do good things for wildlife. Don’t shoot anybody,
and don’t hurt anybody”!
9
MR. STUPPS: “Don’t do anything!”
MR. GUVATIS: “Protect the wildlife!” They would assign me to Agent Browney for a
couple of days, or any new people on my staff, when I was Great Swamp. Browney was
the agent for the State, and he would come in and he would take the trainee manager, or
the assistant manager, or whoever, the maintenance man, ‘cause we had a maintenance
man then at Great Swamp and they would go with him for a day or two during the duck
season or during the open deer season in New Jersey. They would look for people jack
lighting deer and so on. They would get involved in some cases and get a pep talk and
the agent would then write a letter and say that this person is ready for authority. He
would get them their credentials.
MR. STUPPS: The first training got was up at Moosehorn, the agents put it on. I think it
was in the early 1960s.
MR. GOETTEL: So you got your badge in 1949, but you didn’t get your training until
ten or fifteen years later?
MR. GUVATIS: That was like a workshop. They started do these workshops around the
nation.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it like a refresher class?
MR. GUVATIS: Well, it was both. It was an attempt at giving some training. But
people like Tom, and a lot of us had been around, and doing these things for years. We
had been rubbing elbows with the agents and other staff. We had learned, and gone to
court and witnessed testimony and stuff like that. We were somewhat proficient,
obviously at that point.
MR. GOETTEL: You were assuming that the agents had training. You have to wonder
what kind of training they had.
MR. STUPPS: I can’t remember if it was at this session or not, but I remember talking to
Orin Steele or Duke White, and they said they didn’t have any training either. And they
said they could remember shooting over people heads that wouldn’t come out of a blind.
And they were shooting.
MR. GUVATIS: Those were the good old day. [joking]
MR. STUPPS: Imagine doing that today! This was probably in the 1960s. I don’t know
what year they started.
MR. GUVATIS: There were wild stories then, about poachers shooting, and not over
your head either, you know, between your legs and by your ear!
10
MR. STUPPS: I can remember out on Pine Island they would actually search, go right
down a guys legs and the whole works. Physically search each person if they were just
walking through the marsh. They didn’t even see them hunting!
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, things have changed.
MR. STUPPS: It certainly has!
MR. GOETTEL: You were saying earlier that they gave you your handcuffs, and your
“45”?
MR. STUPPS: That was just a joke.
MR. GUVATIS: They did that as a joke. They laid it out on the table.
MR. STUPPS: On my bed!
MR. GUVATIS: And you thought that this was what you were going to be into!
Handcuffs and “45s” ! Actually they never issued guns early on. And most stations
didn’t even have them. Parker River was probably one of the first ones to have them
because of their serious law enforcement problems. With a couple hundred thousand or
half a million visitors there, or however many it was they actually had guns issued. I can
remember having a “22” pistol that I paid twenty-two dollars for. It was a German Burgo
revolver, and that was my sidearm for years. Then I went to a station that had a gun.
Or you carried a shotgun in the vehicle during the hunting season to dispatch a wounded
deer, or to make you feel a little more comfortable striding up to guys with guns in their
hands! It was pretty casual!
MR. STUPPS: It certainly was!
MR. GUVATIS: We always marveled, and thought it was a credit to the Service
employees that nobody ever got shot. And nobody ever shot anyone.
MR. STUPPS: There would have been some lawsuits!
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah! I think that overall, with these jack-of-all-trades refuge people,
all the way from maintenance staff, to Refuge Manager to biologist, whatever they were,
handled all these duties with no training.
MR. STUPPS: With no training.
MR. GUVATIS: With no training and to their credit. They used good judgment. And
you never heard of anybody getting shot, or shooting somebody unnecessarily, or any of
that kind of stuff. They used remarkable restraint, and tact and diplomacy. Obviously we
had some people who were better than others on the staffs but we went for a long time,
and it’s a miracle almost, that something bad didn’t happen. If you look at the fire
program where people actually died, this never really happened, as I can remember, in
11
the law enforcement. If it did it was very rare. And nobody that I can remember at the
stations that I was involved with ever had a problem. They used to routinely shoot dogs
that were killing deer, running deer, but again, I think that the public accepted the
authority then too. It wasn’t abused, and it was respected. Now, everybody questions
authority. That’s been going on since the 1960s and 1970s.
MR. STUPPS: That was a big change.
MR. GUVATIS: The image has changed too.
MR. STUPPS: I think it was the late 1940s or early 1950s that they brought in a tractor
trailer, and left it full of creosote lumber, there at the airport. We were supposed to
unload it there, because the bridge was only ten ton, and haul it down to the refuge.
MR. GUVATIS: This was at Parker River Refuge.
MR. STUPPS: The stuff was just leaching the creosote, and I said, “We’re not going to
do this. We’re going to take the truck down over the bridge.
MR. GUVATIS: Over that rickety little bridge!
MR. STUPPS: Over the bridge, and I bet you there was thirty or forty tons total.
MR. GUVATIS: But it was long, and it was distributed over a big area! Two wheels on
the bridge, and two wheels on the other side!
MR. STUPPS: But I had never driven a tractor-trailer in my life! But I got on it, and
drove it across the bridge and took it down there.
MR. GUVATIS: You didn’t know any better! [laughing]
MR. STUPPS: No, and I got away with it.
MR. GUVATIS: Hey, I was a student out of UMASS, a city boy out of Lawrence, and
this guy, before I knew it, had me in a dump truck hauling gravel from Rowley. He says,
“You’re going to get experience from all levels, you know!” And you had me running
the dozer, the “D-4” I can remember that. Then, down at Brigantine, literally, they turned
me loose with that road grader on that seven- mile auto tour route. God forbid, and I was
a nervous wreck, running these levers, and pulling these things and going by cars! It was
open to the public. Holy cripes! I made it around with killing anybody or without going
into the marsh! When I think about the things that we did, it’s amazing. But we all got
through it. We all understood the whole program that way. I thought it was healthy.
You did, everybody did. That every refuge manager trainee got to run the dump truck,
the dozer, the grader, and then had to maintain it. To know were the grease fittings were.
And then, if you ever became a manager, you had some appreciation, respect and
12
understanding of the needs. And if you had a maintenance man who wasn’t greasing the
tractor, you’d know it. We had these inspections then that would mean something then!
We had to take care of airboats too.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah airboats too. I believe “Key” Wallace was the first one that had an
airboat.
MR. GUVATIS: I think it was a Blackwater.
MR. STUPPS: I think he built it himself.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, they were all built early. The one I had at Montezuma, I took to
Canada for two months, Lake Appatibby, on the Quebec, Ontario border with an agent
assigned. We lived in tents, and trapper’s cabins for two months. We night lighted at
night and bait trapped during the day, and slept a little bit in between. We were there
until early September, when the frost came in. And we banded thousands of ducks. But
we used to work with the agents. They called it management enforcement then. That
was their title. They were game management agents. And they were part of the division
of management enforcement I guess. But they did a lot of other things besides law
enforcement then, surveys and banding, and all kinds of things. And we used to go with
them sometimes as Refuge employees.
MR. STUPPS: They went up into Canada. But we had no training back then.
MR. GUVATIS: It was all on the job training. I learned more on the refuges. I think
J.C. Apple who I never considered a real biologist, but he was a refuge manager. I think
he was the one who showed me how to age and sex waterfowl. If he wasn’t the one, I
don’t know who was, because Bill Farb wasn’t even there when started as a student. He
came just after that, maybe my second or third year there. There aren’t many people
around now who know how to age and sex waterfowl, internally, and knowing how to
use the wind characteristics. Its incredible, identifying ducklings that are six weeks old,
and don’t even have all of their plumage. When you get up in Canada, we were banding
golden eyes, bald pates, pintails, ringtails, and I defy 99% of the people who are in the
Service now to even begin to tell me what species they are, let alone what age are or what
sex they are! It’s amazing, the skills that we developed just with very little training. But
somebody showed me how to sex a duck or a goose and I started with that, and became
very proficient at it, obviously.
MR. STUPPS: Ed Addy, he was the biologist when I first went up there.
MR. GUVATIS: He was at Patuxent when I was there. Ed used to help me, but I think
J.C. was the one who showed me. He had enough experience. Everybody did. I mean
when you shot the cannon over black ducks, the whole staff was there. Even the
secretary was probably even there, all the guys were there at least. Secretaries were
usually women in those days. There were a few men. Howard Jung was a male secretary
when he started. He started as a GS-2 at Fort Niobrara I believe it was in region six, now.
13
He always talked about starting as a GS-2, and ending up as a GS-14 or the equivalent of
an assistant Regional Director type position, like Don Young would have been in. We
had a male secretary at Iroquois, Bob Wolfe. He was a wonderful secretary for “Smitty”.
MR. GOETTEL: Some of those guys had law enforcement authority too, right?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, they did. Right. Everybody did, even the Biologists did. Well,
you needed it then, at least we thought we did. We were kind of groping our way along
on some of this stuff. The rapport that we now have with the local police and the game
warden came along later. I remember Norm Marble used to always be at Parker River
helping out.
MR. STUPPS: And Mark Tollomio.
MR. GUVATIS: Yes, Mark Tollomio and other guys whose names I can’t remember.
MR. GOETTEL: [to Mr. Stupps], So basically, you spent your whole career at Parker
River. When did you retire?
MR. STUPPS: 1987.
MR. GUVATIS: Yes sir, a lot of managers come and go. It was the continuity that we
had then, and probably still do. The secretaries like Mrs. Welch, could basically run
those stations between managers, and did. Then they trained the new manager. A
greenhorn, came in and they taught them how to run the maintenance and operations
programs. And a lot of the other parts the program too. They would do the candidate
sites for waterfowl, and doing patrols in the whalers during the waterfowl season. I came
remember Woody running me around on biological surveys. You needed two people to
be jumping in and out of the boat into the marsh, taking samples or making cases or
whatever.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, the maintenance people used to do the surveys.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, I remember that. When I was a student, I think you or somebody
took me down and showed me how to do the waterfowl survey. The shorebird or wading
bird survey, were done once a week. Somebody did, it wasn’t J. C., it must have been
you or …
MR. STUPPS: Was Stanwood still working there?
MR. GUVATIS: No. Well if he was, I never… He was working at sub headquarters I
think when I first started. But I never really met the guy. Or if I did, I don’t remember
him. I think he was sick then, or something. Didn’t he die on the job?
MR. STUPPS: He retired and didn’t live very long afterwards.
14
MR. GUVATIS: I think I knew Moe Stanwood’s name, and I knew where he lived, but I
don’t think I ever met the guy. I think he was already gone when I got there. Maybe he
was doing it before I got there. We used to have a weekly survey that we drove.
MR. GOETTEL: You were saying that the Manager at Parker River when you started
was a GS-7?
MR. STUPPS: A GS-7, or a P-2 whatever that was.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh that’s right. That was before the GS ratings.
MR. GUVATIS: [to Mr. Stupps], You were a WG?
MR. STUPPS: I was a CPC-5.
MR. GUVATIS: Then what did you go to?
MR. STUPPS: A GS-5. I was a refuge assistant. I was a refuge assistant until they
changed me to a Foreman-3.
MR. GUVATIS: And that was to your advantage. I can remember discussions at some
point when we were going to put you into GS, or leave you at WG. And you were far
ahead. You were making more money there, than the managers for a while I think!
MR. STUPPS: No I was pretty close.
MR. GUVATIS: There were times when they did these wage surveys, and you’d jump
ahead because the GS didn’t keep up with the current surveys. They had these wage rate
surveys every year, or every couple of years.
MR. STUPPS: Every year. We used to do them for the local area. We would try to go
to the places that would pay the most. But our people did so many variable jobs that it
was hard to get someone to compare to.
MR. GUVATIS: They’d pick the electrical duties or the mechanical duties to compare
to.
MR. STUPPS: The mechanics would go to the equipment operators. And I don’t think
we could get into the plumbing and electrical, because that would be above where we
were. But it was hard for us to justify the wages to where we could keep people.
MR. GUVATIS: But we expected people to do all of these things. They had to know
electrical, and plumbing, and be able to do it. That’s the thing, they were all jacks-of-all-trades.
15
MR. STUPPS: And law enforcement too. There were so many things doing on, that
finally we had to follow the lead agency, which was up in Portsmouth. I don’t know if it
was the Air Base or the Naval Shipyard. Everybody got a big raise. As a matter of fact, I
was a GS-5, and they went ahead of me.
MR. GUVATIS: And you were supervising them. I think I remember some of that.
MR. STUPPS: I don’t know who was there as refuge manager, but they’d have to write a
letter each year to justify giving me a step increase before it was time. So I was in that
part of all that. I think it was Bill French who talked me into going into the wage grade
supervisor. So I went into that, which was a much better paying job. I got quite a raise.
MR. GUVATIS: Well you deserved it! [then to Mr. Goettel] He ran the whole program.
We had a farming program back in those days. We plowed and planted what seemed like
acres and acres, maybe it wasn’t, but it was in the . . .
MR. STUPPS: We used to plant about one hundred acres, over one hundred acres of
upland, and one hundred acres in the marsh.
MR. GUVATIS: There was winter rye. And in the marsh you’d put millet. There was
rye too, along the edges. We were really into farming in the Service back then. In this
region and probably all regions. That kind of got phased out. Then they went to
permanent pastures and we used to and they still do cattail crushing and spraying and
mowing of vegetation. But we didn’t really get into the planting of marsh vegetation. I
can remember at Montezuma, they used to go out… there’s pictures and movies . . .Larry
Smith would be a good contact for this region, even though he’s not here… he was at
Monomoy and then at Iroquois forever…he’s got documentation. If you want
documentation, he’s the guy. He’s got the films on the night lighting. I can remember
seeing pictures of Vern Dewey who was a clerk at Montezuma when Larry Smith was the
manager there, walking on the mudflats with snowshoes, seeding Walter’s millet, or Jiff
millet, one or the other, during the draw down. And one hundred thousand ducks would
come into that impoundment. They would show the pictures of the timber area right next
to these mudflats having one hundred thousand mallards. And in this region that was a
lot of ducks. It was a one thousand acre impoundment. Vern Dewey planted the whole
edge of it in millet. He did it with his hand-cranked seeder.
MR. GEOTTEL: Yes, he is a legend.
MR. STUPPS: It must have been in the early 1950s, that I built a carrying cage on one of
the trucks. I used to go down to Bombay Hook and Blackwater, and bring up mallards,
and Canada geese. I still have a picture of cage I built. I don’t know how many mallards
I could bring back. It was a two tiered for Canada geese, and four or five tiered for duck.
[battery failure]
Mr. GUVATIS: When’s the last time you looked?
16
MR. GOETTEL: Just a minute ago.
MR. GUVATIS: Oh really? Now he’s getting proficient with his equipment here. [to
Mr. Stupps] You know what you gotta do? You’ve gotta get one of those from the other
regions, that aren’t using them, and run to them! [talking about tape recorder]
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, you’re right.
MR. GUVATIS: Run them parallel and then just erase one of them later, and reuse it.
MR. GOETTEL: I might have to bum a couple of batteries off of you later, George, if
this goes out again. [Mr. Guvatis tries to get them] No, sit tight, we’ll see how it goes.
MR. GUVATIS: Well, I should get them out of the freezer. What kind are they “AA”?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah.
MR. GUVATIS: Let me pull a couple out.
MR. GOETTEL: [to Mr. Stupps] did you build the impoundments at Parker River?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I was there when they were built. They had a yard and a half
dragline. A guy by the name of Jody Katren from Missouri, he was the operator. He was
the second operator. The first operator came from Amesbury, Ed Valley.
MR. GOETTEL: Were they Service employees?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah. Well, they were hired and put on the payroll.
MR: GUVATIS: [returning with batteries] I’ve got more downstairs. I don’t have my
glasses on, is that an “AA”?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, that’s the right size, thanks.
MR. GOETTEL: O.K. we’ll try it again here, Tommy. You started to say that you
started working on the dikes in 1948?
MR. STUPPS: In 1948. And the north and south pool was completed in I believe it was
1950.
MR. GOETTEL: Those are huge dikes.
MR. STUPPS: I think they are 1.8, but the base, I forget the size of the base, but the top
was ten foot. And I think it had a three to one slope. It seems to me that they were sixty
to seventy feet at the base.
MR. GOETTEL: I wouldn’t doubt it.
17
MR. STUPPS: A lot of material went out there.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you haul the material out there?
MR. STUPPS: No, we took the material out of what they called the “barrow pit”. We
took it out of one part of the marsh, and poured it up on top of the marsh. Joe Hager, who
was the state Ornithologist, said we would never be successful. In, number one, getting
black ducks up on our fields, in which he was proven wrong. And he said that the dikes
would never work either, they would never hold water. He was partially right on that
one. We held water in the spring. But we were not successful in holding water other
times.
MR. GUVATIS: The dikes didn’t leak. It seemed like the ground water would go down,
and the impoundment would go down with it.
MR. STUPPS: There was nothing running in.
MR. GUVATIS: No, there was nothing running in, and it was sand. Probably, when it
was clean sand, before it got covered with organic material and vegetation, and stuff, it
probably did drain even faster than it did after it silted up. Or where there was still peat
underneath.
MR. STUPPS: The north pool would hold more water than the south pool would.
MR. GUVATIS: I remember that.
MR. STUPPS: When Nightingale was there, we used to try to put dye in it to try and see
where it was going. We’d go out and look at the creek, and see if we could see any due
coming out.
MR. GUVATIS: I think it was just the water table.
MR. STUPPS: But it held more in one than the other.
MR. GUVATIS: The south pool had more sand. And it has less organics in it. That was
part of it too. There are a lot of theories on what did it. Do you guys want a drink? Are
you thirsty? Would you like some lemonade or something?
MR. GOETTEL AND MR. STUPPS: No thanks.
MR. GUVATIS: [referring to tape recorder] is it working again?
MR GOETTEL: Yeah, we’re all set.
MR. GUVATIS: Do you know how much you lost?
18
MR. GOETTEL: We didn’t loose that much. I had just glanced at it. And I have been
glancing at it regularly.
MR. GUVATIS: You have become a professional interviewer. You need a checklist.
MR. GOETTEL: Two tape recorders!
MR. GUVATIS: That’s what I would have! That’s the reason, I keep saying when I’m
out in the field taking notes, and I keep saying that I should get a tape recorder. But boy,
if you loose that whole days worth of talking. As long as you keep checking it, and knew
that it was working and know what happened to it. Even when my pad gets wet, or my
pencil stops writing, at least I know it.
MR. GUVATIS: [to Mr. Stupps] did you say that you brought some pictures and things
to show to Tom?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah. Sure, I’ll show them to Tom later.
MR. GOETTEL: Good, I appreciate that.
MR. STUPPS: Now, the “stageamen” pool, which is about a one hundred acre pool, the
National Guard brought in two D-7s. And I don’t know who was there then.
MR. GUVATIS: Those were big machines. That was down when Nightingale was there,
I was told. It was done before I got there.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, it was. That’s right. I went down there with no engineering. No
nothing and I just started pushing dirt. There was a creek, that was probably sixty or
seventy feet wide, a tidal creek. There was a footbridge that went across there from Plum
Island to Stage Island. I built out from this side, as far as I could with what material I
had. Just sand. Then I went on the other side, and I pushed up a great big pile of dirt.
MR. GUVATIS: How did you get on the other side?
MR. STUPPS: You could go around Bar Head.
MR. GUVATIS: So it wasn’t really, totally an island?
MR. STUPPS: No. And I thought I had enough dirt that I could close it off on one tide.
And I did. I closed it off on one tide. But there was a lot of dirt out there. I remember…
MR. GUVATIS: And it’s held? It held to this day?
MR: STUPPS: Oh yeah!
MR: GOETTEL: It must have been mostly muck, wasn’t it though?
19
MR. STUPPS: It was mostly sand.
MR. GUVATIS: It was glacial till. And the first part was probably all sand though.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, it was all sand.
MR. GUVATIS: From the other side, from the dunes. Where did you get that fill, out of
the sand pits there?
MR. STUPPS: No, there was a little dune to the north of it. So I used that. And it
wasn’t very wide, just enough to hold the machine up. We didn’t get another machine in
there until a few years later so we could build it the right way when we had enough
material.
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember my student report, just being new to the Service, and
knowing that Nightingale just built that dike, and the other dikes had been built before
him I guess, that I was recommending impoundment using Grape Island and Cross Farm.
MR. STUPPS: I remember you talking about that.
MR. GUVATIS: That’s how we operated in those days. That should make a nice
impoundment! Connect Grape Island with this one, and that one! [laughing] No feat too
big!
MR. STUPPS: And nobody asked anyone.
MR. GUVATIS: No, we just did it!
MR. STUPPS: I can remember on Stage Island, Arthur Miller, who was regional
supervisor, I was up in Maine, at Moosehorn, and I was staying in the same hotel he was,
and we were talking. And he said it would be nice if we had a dike across Stage Island.
He probably talked to some people.
MR. GUVATIS: He probably had talked to some engineers or something.
MR. STUPPS: No, we had no engineers then.
MR. GUVATIS: That’s before they got in the way.
MR. STUPPS: He probably discussed it with Gordon.
MR. GUVATIS: Or maybe Salyer in Washington.
MR. STUPPS: I bet you not, because I had started and I didn’t have any level or
anything, so I took and drove a post in the ground, and took a level, and leveled a stick
20
across it and pull my hand level on it. And we’d sight down that to see what height I was
at. And it worked!
MR. GOETTEL: No laser levels then? [all laughing]
MR. GUVATIS: Well, when I started, we had these dumpy levels. We had the tripods.
My supervisor Tom Horne at Montezuma came out and gave me a two-hour lesson on
how to run a dumpy level. Hell, we made six hundred acres of impoundment, and six
miles of dike, with just this dumpy level and some stakes. We got patted on the back for
a nice straight dike with good slope, three to one, or five to one. It was interesting, we
were surveyors, and we were everything. And firefighters too!
MR. STUPPS: That’s another thing that Arthur Miller would do. He’d come out, and he
would set the marsh on fire. The Georgetown fire tower, they threatened finally, that
they were going to put us in jail. He would come out and do it.
MR. GUVATIS: We were the “Feds” you couldn’t do that to us. People really accepted
that in those days to a large degree. A lot of it was Federal sovereignty, it’s the federal
government, and “they can do whatever the hell they want”!
MR. STUPPS: Well heck, Moe Stanley, when I first came up here, he didn’t even think
we had to stop for red lights! He came up the Merrick Parkway in a truck, right after the
Second World War, or during it, I’m not sure which, and he drove all the way up the
Merrick Parkway in this government truck.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GUVATIS: It was a “no trucks” road. I can remember we used to waive through
the New Hampshire tolls, the Portsmouth tolls, because we were government. They just
waived us through. Just took your horn and say, “look at the plate”, and away we go!
MR. STUPPS: I think the worst trip I ever made, I don’t know what year it was, I was
sent up to bring back a dozer, and I got a picture of that trailer, it was a homemade trailer,
it was a GMC dump truck, probably a ton and half. It didn’t have no doors on it, and it
was right hand drive. And it didn’t have nothing from the engine, back. No mufflers, no
nothing! Moe Stanley’s boy went with me, and we could even hear ourselves talk! The
people would go by, and they would be holding their ears. Why we didn’t get [in trouble,
I’ll never know.]
MR. GUVATIS: Only in those days could you have done that! What year was that?
MR. STUPPS: This had to be in 1948, or 1949. One time, when I was coming through
one town, and there was a hill, back then the old trucks didn’t have much power, and a
cop ran up, and jumped up on the running board, and said, “Where you from?” So I told
him I was with the government, and he jumped off and left!
21
MR. GUVATIS: [joking] “This is government business boy, step aside!”
MR. STUPPS: It’s just amazing that someone didn’t get killed. Because we had no
training, we just got in the truck, and drove! In this truck I was driving, the trailer was
nine foot, six. Eight foot is the law. We used it right up into the 1950s. I’ve got a
picture of it.
MR. GOETTEL: What was that “cattail crusher” that you were talking about? You said
you made that Tommy? What was that like? I’ve never heard of that.
MR. GUVATIS: We’ve got pictures of that. We’ve got pictures of all of that stuff.
Those narrative reports, and what Tom’s got, it’s probably easier to find in Tom’s files,
and a lot of that stuff is in the narrative reports.
MR. STUPPS: I think the Refuge got rid of all their files. That’s where I got most of
these pictures, because the Refuge was throwing them away.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no! No kidding?
MR. GUVATIS: You wouldn’t believe the stuff that gets “chucked” out of the files!
MR. STUPPS: Tom Horne didn’t like to keep nothing!
MR. GUVATIS: When I was doing the “sick sea” stuff at Parker River, I saw narrative
reports that I had written when I was there, or my staff had written. There were four
copies, Washington copy, regional copy, circulating copy for the country, and the station
copy. With the circulating copy, the tradition was that when it came back, it would be
sent to whoever the station manager was at the time. That kind of fell apart. But all four
copies were still in the file!
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GUVATIS: I can remember the regional office saying “We don’t want these
anymore, we’ve read them, and we’re sending them back”. And Washington sent them
back, at some point, whether they had them archived or not. I’ll bet you they didn’t. So
there was four copies. And they said just take them, rather than taking notes out of them.
We don’t need them. Everything that had more than two copies, I left. I mean, when
there was less than two copies, I left. When there was three and four, I just took a copy.
So I’ve got some of those. With the blessing of the Refuge, they said they didn’t want all
these copies of these reports. They have the original color photos in them.
MR. STUPPS: I heard that Parker River got rid of theirs.
MR. GUVATIS: Well, when I was down there they had most of them. There were one
or two years missing from when they actually changed the narrative report period, to fit
the program management, or some other such foolishness. There was overlap in some,
22
and gaps in some. Almost every station had a gap for about six months. But they [Parker
River] still have them there, Tom.
MR. STUPPS: They do?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, in fact I’ve got a few that should go back to them. They are ones
where there was a second copy that I barrowed.
MR. STUPPS: I thought sure that they had gotten rid of them.
MR. GUVATIS: No, they still have them. That’s what I did last winter. Moses and I
were down there. They are almost all there. What the heck were we talking about? I
know we started on something else and drifted off.
MR. GOETTEL: I mentioned the “cattail crusher”.
MR. GUVATIS: Oh, the “cattail crusher”. That was welded, Tom, and these other guys
welded angle iron braces on drums that would roll.
MR. STUPPS: They were fifty-five gallon drums, we would put three together, and weld
angle iron so that the angle iron would stand up and cut the cattail as we put weight on it.
MR. GUVATIS: Did you have water in the drums?
MR. STUPPS: Yeah.
MR. GUVATIS: So they’d fill these drums with water for more weight. It actually did
more damage to the plant, than cutting it off. It injured the plant. It put world of hurt on
that plant! It’s like tatting hay, you know? And somehow, I think it locks up the
nutrients or something, and they can’t get back into the roots. That’s what they do with
hay. They tat it, or knick it, and it makes it dry quicker but it also holds the nutrients in.
But that’s all they did. You could pull a bank of those that was ten or fifteen feet wide. I
remember it being quite wide.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, it was. I don’t remember if it was three or four barrels wide,
maybe twelve feet wide.
MR. GAVUTIS: Like discs, gang discs. Just knock that stuff down. And underneath all
that cattail was all this dormant seed. There was hundreds of years of seed, and muck,
and peat there. It was all salt march. Even a dozen years of millets and smart weeds, a
nut grasses and sedges, and all kinds of stuff would grow up fast. And you’d have
waterfowl food suddenly.
MR. STUPPS: It would open it up.
23
MR. GUVATIS: It would open it up, and you’d have nesting and you’d have waterfowl
feeding. Basically what they were doing was interspersing feed, and open water, and
everything in one hundred acres of cattail. Was fragmities the problem then?
MR. STUPPS: It was just beginning.
MR. GUVATIS: And loostrife was just beginning too. So cattail was the big villain. At
Montezuma, they used to burn it. And they used to mow it and crush it. They had a one
thousand acre impoundment with mostly cattail in it. Where ever you had a too shallow
impoundment were the muskrats couldn’t work the roots in the winter, which was the
case at Parker River and at Montezuma, they would end up with a cattail monotype.
MR. STUPPS: That probably helped the loostrife to get started too.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, the disturbance. A lot of the things we did. The draw downs,”
and flooding would bring in loostrife. We didn’t understand that loostrife would be such
a problem. And now, I’ve used, and I know the Refuges have too, used millet seeding at
a critical time during the draw down to smother out any loostrife reproduction.
MR. STUPPS: Oh, is that right?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, because you know how fast that stuff grows, it’s like buckwheat.
If you put buckwheat on it, it’s good. That’s buckwheat in two thirds of my garden.
Now that the kids have left home, I don’t need it. I put that stuff on, and that will out run
any weed going. And that’s on very light. [pointing out the window] If you put it on
real heavy, like you have to sometimes when the weeds are heavy, it will just kill
everything. Plus, the buckwheat goes way down to the nutrients.
MR. STUPPS: We used to aerial seed millet in the south pool. We’d draw in down and
used to get some good stands.
MR. GUVATIS: Well, I do it out here when we have dry season, and the pond goes
down fast, I put millet on it. But that’s a good way to keep out loostrife encroachment.
If you go into a drought suddenly, in July, just walk around it once a week with a crank
seeder, and put millet seed on it. You won’t get any loostrife seedlings surviving. It will
just smother them out, because they grow so fast, and loostrife seedlings grow relatively
slow the first year. In New York they used to do that in some of the State management
areas, Oak Orchard, and the one named Montezuma, and Helen’s Island.
MR. GOETTEL: So Montezuma was your first station George? Was it your first
permanent station?
MR. GUVATIS: Right, it was my first permanent station as a trainee. I went there
mainly to. . . Tom Horne made me a construction foreman. I knew nothing about it!
He taught me how to run levels and I ended up with a twenty-man crew there. I had three
chainsaw operators, three dragline operators, and three oilers. There were several bull
24
dozer operators and several laborers and actually, near the end, I had a foreman. Still, I
was responsible for that whole program. Finally, I hired the foreman after about the first
six months or so, because the crew was twenty people.
MR. GOETTEL: What was to build the dikes?
MR. GUVATIS: We were building the dikes below Routes 5, and 20. There were six
hundred acres of impoundment, and five miles of dike. We had to clear the swamp
timber, which was mostly white oak, red maple, silver maple, elm, and stuff like that.
We cleared for five miles of dike, one hundred yards wide so we could run dragline. And
the upland parts we built with dozers and then when we got down to the deep parts with
the muck and peat we ran draglines on mats. We had a huge Lima dragline. We had a
“22-B” and a “15-B” which were smaller draglines. They had like a three quarter yard
buckets, and five-eighths buckets. The Lima had a yard bucket I guess, or a yard and a
quarter. They would go maybe one hundred feet a day. It was all staked out. You had
the centerline of the dike, and toes of the five and one slope and the three and one slope,
and then the twenty feet of a berm to run on with the machine. The barrow pits were like
thirty feet wide on each side. We’d push the stumps and the trees back in. There was no
salvaging or anything. Tom Horne wanted us to burn the stuff. Some of the guys on the
staff said that the peat would burn. But he wanted it burnt, “there will be predators and
stuff living in there”. And he was right. So we started burning. That was my first
permanent year with the Service. I didn’t have any law enforcement authority, but
believe me, that first year and a half, we spent a lot of time on fires. We had multiple
chain reaction collisions because in the swamp, at night, the peat would be burning. The
people would come down off of the hills into this fog band where the cold air and the
smoke would settle, and they couldn’t see the road. No body was killed on the Refuge,
except for on the through way. There were other peat fires burning off the Refuge.
Somebody was killed there. But we had two serious, twenty or twenty-five car multiple
collisions. We were out there digging trenches with the backhoes and bringing water
from the canal and the lake in to the fires. We were surrounding the fires with ditches,
and pumping and digging with the dozers. You’d be walking along, and you’d drop in up
to at least your waist, or your chest into a fire pit because it would be hollow. And you’d
think that the fire would be out and you’d find it burning on tree roots. It would pop up
somewhere else, and the wind would fan it and it would get up on top and run and go
down, it was a nightmare! We fought those fires for months, and months, and months. It
took two summers to get them out. Tom Horne finally stopped saying, “burn the
windrows.” Some of them were still there!
MR. STUPPS: You didn’t get them all burned?
MR. GUVATIS: That was five miles of dike on two sides. So that was ten miles of
windrows to burn. And a lot of it was organic soil and it burned out like it did at Stage
Island. I guess you guys had some fires there. It made wonderful habitat. The fire
would go down to the water table. And until it hit the water table, it would just keep
burning. Those roots would burn.
MR. STUPPS: You didn’t even know that they were burning!
25
MR. GUVATIS: No! And you could smell it, but you couldn’t even see the smoke
unless you really looked. We found that the only way to really get them out was to get a
dozer right in the fire hole and dig it out, and sort it, and wet it down as you did it. We
had these pumps. We had no fire training whatsoever and it was fairly hazardous. We
had people fall into fire pits and scramble out and jump in the ditch to get wet real quick!
Their feet would be burning, or their hip boots would be melting, that kind of thing. It
was kind of interesting there. That was my primary job. I also worked with the agent
and got my law enforcement authority when I was there. We did controlled burns on the
cattail marshes there, like Tom was talking about. We used to fire them up every couple
of years and burn them off, and get rid of the biomass, and actually extend the life
expectancy of the impoundments buy getting rid of some of that biomass. Again, you’d
get a regeneration of the millets, and the “smart weeds” and a really nice response for the
first year or two until the cattail would come back in again.
MR. GOETTEL: So, you were there for a couple of years?
MR. GUVATIS: I was there a year and a half. From there I went to Iroquois Refuge for
a couple of years, under Henry Whitley. “Nook” Wilson was the maintenance man there,
and Rudy “somebody” was a laborer, and Joanne Smith was the secretary. Henry
Whitley was a remarkable man in his day. He had built these dikes that you had [to Mr.
Stupps] but he built seven miles of dike, half way out to Atlantic City! It had a sand core,
no clay. Just sand dikes, and he vegetated them with sprigs of dune grass. He was a
remarkable man, he probably never got due credit for what he did. He kind of fell apart
at the end of his career. He took up heavy drinking. I ended up having to run that station
during his last year. It was sort of a sad way to go. In fact, that whole area is bad when it
comes to alcohol. It’s depressed with it. There’s a bar on every corner, and people down
in that country were depressed. They were all drinkers. The whole staff was heavy
drinkers. His last year, he never got the fanfare that he deserved. He did an incredible
feat, building that dike. They had carryall scrapers and draglines and dozers.
MR. STUPPS: I think he got so much excess material.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, he did! That’s how he got all of his equipment. And he supplied
the whole region, like Eddie French is trying to do now, with his brother-in-law.
Equipment from all over the region probably came from Whitley. There’s a guy that did
single handedly, he only had two maintenance people, and a patrolman, almost all of the
work. But down there, I kind of ran the operations program, because he left while I was
there. He retired. People from all over the region came. Larry Smith was there, taking
pictures.
MR. GOETTEL: This was down at Brigantine?
MR. GUVATIS: This was Brigantine.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought you said “Iroquois”.
26
MR. GUVATIS: No, then went…
MR. GOETTEL: You went from Iroquois to Brigantine?
MR. GUVATIS: No. I went to Brigantine, and then I swapped. . . the order was
Montezuma, Brigantine, then Iroquois. Ed Moses was at Iroquois when I was at
Brigantine, he had started Erie with “Smitty”. And Moses went to Great Meadows or
someplace, maybe Parker River. I moved in there for a year at Iroquois under Larry
Smith. That’s where I sprayed Agent Orange for a month. And we did all kinds of
things.
I also built one thousand acres of impoundment there. We had three pans, and a couple
of big dozers. We also had a couple of draglines too. I remember one day, after we were
done with the project. We built a dike, and they had estimates of one hundred thousand
dollars to build it. The lowest estimate bid to build this dike was around two hundred
thousand. So Tom Horne, having used me at Great Swamp, and knowing my
capabilities, and having had me work with Whitley at Brigantine, and knowing that I
knew how to do these things said, “we’ll do a force account”. And we went out and
hired contractors. Dick Murphy was one of them. He would say, “all right, just tell us
what you want”. There was people back then that would work for you. He’d write up the
“specs”. We would put service recorder clocks on the machines, so we could track them.
I still have some of the old discs and the keys.
MR. STUPPS: Do you?
MR. GUVATIS: Oh yeah. It’s amazing. But it worked.
MR. STUPPS: You couldn’t beat it.
MR. GUVATIS: We when out and got the equipment and the operators and paid them
by the clock. We changed the clocks every day, changed the discs, and kept them for the
records. When we were all done, we built that dike for forty thousand dollars. They only
had one hundred and twenty and we built it for forty. Then I found an old dike in the
woods that split the impoundment in half and made two impoundments, a four hundred
and a six hundred acre one. We renovated that dike. The last day was almost like a
salute. We marched all that equipment in rows. We had all these pans and dozers.
Everywhere I went, we built a pond at the residence I was living at. They just went
around and around, all day. And that pond went down. It’s there right now. It’s a
beautiful farm pond, probably twenty-five feet deep, at Iroquois.
MR. GOETTEL: How many acres?
MR. GUVATIS: It’s about an acre. They just, all day, dug, dug, dug. Then they still
weren’t out of money. That’s when they went over to the Job Corps, and started on
another project, and I transferred. They were still spending that one hundred and twenty
thousand when I left. We built miles and miles of dike. And we built what we called
27
little “dikelettes” which were little organic dikes. They weren’t hauled in clay material
with stone riprap and all that. But they were twenty to one slopes so that they could over
top every spring, and not wash out. They were maybe twenty-five to one, very long
slopes. They lasted for years. The muskrats raised hell with them, as they do with any
dike. But they were so long, and so wide that they never got through them for years.
They had to keep eating in on the pool sides for years to get the dike riddled.
From there I went to Great Swamp. Tom [Horne] wanted me to go the Great Swamp.
When we moved in to the house at Iroquois, we couldn’t get our queen-size mattress in
the door. And “Smitty” says, “I’ll put another window in there at the top of the stairs, so
we can get your queen-sized mattress in. But you have to promise me you’re going to
stay for two years”! I said, “O.K., I promise”. And I’m there a year, and Tom Horne
says he wants me to go to Great Swamp, and “Smitty” says,” What do you mean? We
got a two year commitment out of this thing”! Whose boss here? You know Horne!
And I said, “Geez, I thought you thought more of me than to send me to a place like
Great Swamp”. I was kind of his “pet” boy. I really didn’t think he’d do that to me. It
had such an awful reputation. It was a new station in New Jersey no less. It was in north
Jersey, near Times Square. It was only twenty or twenty-five miles from Times Square.
I thought, “God, what are they doing to me”? I went there, and when I got there we
walked all of the wetlands on the refuge. It was coming out of long, long drought. We
walked along these little brooks, like Black Brook and Grey Brook, and we found three
duck broods on the whole refuge. And there were probably not a total of two or three
acres of water, mostly in stream channels and ditch bottoms. There were huge ditches
that went on for miles. And Tom wanted to start pumping money in. And again, we
hired one guy, with his machines. He had a pay loader and he had a little dozer. He
would jump back and forth from one to the other. And we had those clocks. Tom Horne
started pouring money in. And the first year we had no water. We had two or three old
wood duck boxes, and one had a nest that nobody even knew about. We started
increasing wood duck boxes, and increasing water. The second year we had one
thousand acres of water, just from plugging ditches. When I left there, in five years, we
had three thousand acres of water on less than six thousand acres. Standing water. We
had built two or three hundred ditch plugs. And some dikes like the Stage Island dike,
because Tom Horne just kept pumping money in. All the other managers were
wondering and complaining, “Great Swamp took all our money”! And at the end of the
year if there was any money lying around, instead of buying new vehicles, it all went to
Great Swamp. I had like four assistants. I had an assistant for public use. I had an
assistant biologist. I had an assistant that ran the construction program with “Dailey”.
They buried thirty or forty homesteads. These were the days when I left there, Tom
McAndrews had paid like, twenty thousand dollars, just before I got there to get one
house put into a dumpster, and hauled away properly. Me being still the country boy,
and reckless, and getting away with murder, we had that guy with that pay loader come in
to these homesteads that were right on the paved road and we’d do it in the off season. In
the pouring rain, in the morning he’d come in and dig a pit that would be twenty feet
deep in the clay and he’d go over and “munch” that house and push it into that hole.
Then we’d burn it. It would burn all day, and at the end of the day we capped it with
clay. That was the end of it.
28
MR. STUPPS: That was it!
MR. GUVATIS: Vehicles, equipment, buildings, everything went in there. Any thing
that would burn in the fire pit went. The next day we’d be out there cranking seed on to
the little mound that was left of it. We took out paved roads that were in the wilderness.
A mile and a half of paved road was taken out because it split the wilderness in half. And
Congress told us to go and plug all the ditches so we did. We caught hell from the
Mosquito Commission, and from the neighbors and everything. With water everywhere.
It’s a wet area anyway, beyond what the refuge does.
MR. GOETTEL: But that was a good investment though. It was money well spent.
MR. GUVATIS: People couldn’t believe it. I called Tom Horne at home one day I
think. I said, “You’ve got to come down here, in the next couple of weeks, you’re not
going to believe this, we’ve put in forty-two ditch plugs. And it started to rain last
week”. It would back up behind one ditch plug, and run around through the swamp
woods to the next ditch plug, and it was just like stepping-stones. And every day I went
over there, you could find a new wetland! It was incredible! The duck weed and the
trees are starting to die by the second year. So Tom Horne came out, and he couldn’t
believe it. And Salyer had talked about Great Peace Meadows and Troy Meadows, and
Great Swamp. Great Swamp got the lowest ranking in the Service. And the region had
kind of “gone after” Great Swamp, but there was a lot of criticism from Washington
about having done that, because it was the least desirable of the three. But the potential
was there. With Horne’s help, we realized that! Nobody ever spoke poorly about Great
Swamp after that. They read the narratives with all these pictures. I’ve got aerial photos
showing all of these little ditch plugs with all of the wetlands formed behind them that are
there to this day. Roger Tory Peterson came out and was photographing. He found five
Least Bitterns in one palmett farm, that’s kind of a rare bird these days. I just got a write
up from the New Hampshire Audubon about a sighting of a Least Bittern, and they said
that every sighting in New Hampshire has to be written up. Parker River and Stage
Island had them in these impoundments and on these restored wetlands. Big places, one
hundred acres, sometime one thousand acres were full of things like Least Bitterns, and
King Rails, and Pied-Billed Grebes and Moorhens. But that’s what you get with refuges.
And without them you don’t get that kind of thing because you don’t have these big
wetlands restored. They’re all drained.
MR. STUPPS: It would be impossible to do it today.
MR. GUVATIS: Oh yeah! And the other thing is…the first year I was out there we put
fifty wood duck boxes up. We doubled the boxes every year I was there. And when I
left we had five hundred boxes and we had seven thousand eggs in those boxes that year,
seven thousand wood duck eggs. The production was in the thousands. And we had
roosts in buttonbush that had been drained for decades, if not centuries, and thousands of
ducks would pour in for ten or fifteen minutes, right at dark to these roosts. And
poachers would find them, and start shooting the hell out of them after dark. And we’d
make cases against them. But, talk about gratification, it’s just like at any place where
29
you’ve built an impoundment or restored the wetlands, it’s like that. These were drained
wetlands. These were not tidal marshes. Great Swamp was a great ditch with a lot of
agriculture. There were barbed wire fences and grazed in fallow meadow hay and all of
that stuff. Some of the neighbors almost croaked when the water started coming up, and
the cattail came in with the millets and the “smart weeds”.
MR. STUPPS: Did you flood any private property?
MR GUVATIS: A little but, but not too much. Some of the things we did would run on
other people. It was like the Everglades. A lot of it was flowing water; it was very slow
flowing sheet water. Basically, what they did in the CCC days in the 1930s, they dug
these ditches. And they went in intentionally from peninsula to peninsula in these big
swamps, and from island to island, they used the high ground. And when they went
through there, they dug these huge ditches in the clay on these islands and peninsulas.
And they took the water out of its old channels that meandered, and made them like
straight lines connecting all of these dots, the high points. We just came in with the little
tiny dozers, like a “D-2” and we could do like one or two a day. It would cost us maybe
one hundred bucks to build this thing. The next day a guy comes in with a crank seeder,
and would mulch the thing and seed it and boom, you’ve got a nice dike, or ditch plug.
We didn’t have to go in the swamp very much. Just to get from island to island. We had
a campaign, if you started in the wrong place, you couldn’t get back there again, ever.
We started way the hell up in the headwaters, as far as we could. In some of those places
we had trouble getting machinery in because it was organic. We had to go from island to
island, and we started way up and started plugging, and working our way out. We kept
doing that for two years, three year actually. Then we got into the areas with more clay.
You could just plug in there with a little dozer, and make a little barrow pit as part of the
impoundment. About one third of the plugs were extremely high, and then in some
places you would have a little low island, you would build a plug and it would go right
under. It would go right over that plug because the next one down would hold it.
Probably ever one hundred yards, or every two or three hundred yards, you had a plug or
dam. In some places there were these long, convoluted peninsulas and islands with just
this little ditch, as deep as this room going through it. It was a cinch to plug that son of a
bitch. But the Mosquito Commission was going crazy because we were flooding all this
stuff that they had been keeping drained. Most the flooding was on the Refuge. We
could basically tell when we put a plug in, if it was going to flood a guy’s sheep farm or
something. We didn’t do it until we acquired it. There are now, at Great Swamp,
hundreds of acres of wetland that have not been reclaimed because of political pressures
of killing trees and things like that. But these are vernal pools and good wetlands that
some day I hope we will still restore. There was so much water, that they said that we
didn’t need to plug every drainage ditch. To me, if you buy a drained wetland for
wildlife, you plug it! I used to argue with “ES” even. Mike Bartlett and I were good
friends, but we used to argue about the fact that this big ditch was coming out of this nice
shrub swamp, a hummock swamp, and Mike says, “it’s a good wetland, why plug the
ditch?” and I said, “Because it’s supposed to be a deep, freshwater marsh with cattail.
It’s a Least Bittern habitat, not a frog pond”. A frog pond will dry up quick. If we plug
this little ditch it will be a frog pond, which will last two months. I was just trying to
30
bring it back to what if was historically. All of these things had drainages, but they
weren’t where they dug the ditches. They dug the ditches in the easy access points in the
deep clay soil. It was very easy to undo what they did. If they had dug those ditches
along the stream channels, through the muck and swamp, then you would have had an
awful time plugging in. Then you’d need beavers. We even brought beavers in too.
MR. GOETTEL: You did?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, and they got in trouble. They immediately went to backyards
and places where they didn’t belong. They have been a big disappointment there. When I
go down there on my annual deer hunts on the refuge, when it’s open for deer hunting,
people can’t believe I go out with fifteen inch boots way into the wilderness area, and
come out with a deer. This is Lou Hines, and Al Lizgowski guys that are swamp rats,
just like me. But they can’t believe it. “You mean you went in with those boots and you
aren’t even wet? And you got to Island Pond and Fishhook Island, and you aren’t wet?”
I said, “Yeah, but I crossed on these plugs that are underwater.” The next plug down is
holding. If you know where the plug is, and don’t step off the edge into six feet of water,
it’s only this deep. [demonstrating] The deer know where they are. And I know where
they are because I built them. It’s kind of interesting.
MR. GOETTEL: And you didn’t want to go there, but you probably didn’t want to leave.
MR GUVATIS: So I was there five years, and I didn’t want to leave. Then they wanted
me to go to Parker River. I said I had already been there as a student. You don’t send
people back to where they have already been. The only thing that is really a challenge
would be Rachel Carson, and the law enforcement program. Rachel Carson or Monomoy
because they were kind of undeveloped and still growing, and the law enforcement
program were interesting to me. And besides, I said that I had always lived in refuge
housing, and I had given eighty hours a week. Me and my family, and everybody that
works for me have. If I move up here I’m going to have family and friends, and will
probably move off of the refuge. The house isn’t even on the refuge. It’s up on the north
end of the island and it’s crazy there in the summer. They told me that that was all right,
and that they only expected forty hours a week out of you. Howard Moon said that. And
I told them that they probably wouldn’t get much more than that. Because if I move off
of the refuge, I’m will have a homestead. And I’m not going to live down at Plum Island.
I don’t like too many neighbors around. I like those five thousand acres backyards that I
had been in. So anyhow, I went to Plum Island, and everybody who goes to Plum Island,
if you check the list of regional managers, ends up in the regional office, next. The only
one that broke that tradition was Jack Fillio. I tied the longevity record, which Gordon
Nightingale had set for Plum Island with eight years. But every manager from Plum
Island ended up in regional, and probably then to Washington offices in some cases. And
I didn’t like that. I was a field biologist at heart and really wanted to be out in the field.
The thing that kept me most interested, and challenged, was the law enforcement
program at Parker River. I used to go up to Rachel once a week, if I could, with Maury
and go over different units. It was fun looking at new acquisitions where you could see
boundary encroachments, and see junk on the refuge, and drainage ditches. You would
31
find places where you could store wildlife values on a piece of property that they would
pay a fortune for to buy. A place like Rachel is expensive. And Great Swamp was very
expensive land. It was relatively high end. Now it’s cheap in this day and age.
When I got to Parker River, Tom [Stupps] was there. It was very easy. Mrs. Welsh was
still there.
MR. STUPPS: She was?
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah! I hired Clara Bell as a secretary. Mrs. Welsh was still there. She
retired when I was there. I remember being upset about it. But she had gotten kind of
cranky and crotchety in her older days. But going to Parker River was like going home
we were all good friends. There were Tom, and Woody, and Don I knew them all.
They all helped me get going. They helped me, and trained me and taught me. Here I
was, this young whippersnapper and I was their boss! But we got along well.
MR. STUPPS: We sure did!
MR. GUVATIS: We had a good time there. It was easy for me to concentrate on other
things because I had people like Mrs. Welsh, and Clara who had been the secretary for
the under-secretary of the Navy, and the personal secretary of Senator Tidings of
Maryland before she came to work as a clerk at Parker River! She had been a GS-9, or
higher in Washington, but her husband had retired from the Navy.
MR. STUPPS: He was a Marine. He was a Colonel in the Marine Corps.
MR. GUVATIS: They had moved up here, and she just wanted some work and boy,
what a wonderful “find” she was! She was a beautiful woman, she still is. When she
walked in all the guys were “gah-gah”. They said, “We’re going to hired this one, right?”
Her credentials were incredible, just incredible, and what a wonderful person she was and
is. She was so talented. She spoiled me rotten. You could dictate to her, she would
write your memo for you, and help you with ideas. Everything was done right,
everything. She didn’t do the bookkeeping. You, [Mr. Stupps] and Kaye Garris did that.
But Clara Bell, with the funny name, “Clara belle” being the clown on Howdy Doody,
with her name. But what a talent she was! What an asset to the refuge she was. All of
the secretaries, and clerks were like that. But she was an incredible help to me. She
made my job so much easier. And she was never compensated adequately, although we
got her raises as much as we could. And we were always struggling with “the system” to
give her awards and things. And she was so loyal and so dedicated, what a wonderful
person. Everybody loved her. She finally left, sometime after I did. She is still working
in Newburyport.
MR. STUPPS: She went back to Boston, I thought.
MR. GUVATIS: Yeah, you’re right. She did, but she still works in that gift shop, I
think. She was part-time, but maybe she’s given that up now.
32
Then of course, they dragged me kicking and screaming into the regional office. The
inevitable finally occurred. First I was detailed into the old post office and courthouse
building. Then out to Newton Corner, I got transferred out there finally. I was back and
forth on details in Washington. There was a fourteen-week detail in Washington.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh really? What did you do there?
MR. GUVATIS: We working on the Refuge System EIS. So I got letters in my file.
Don Young was on the task force with me. There was a whole bunch of people. Larry
Smith was a detail man. I think there were about twenty of us. We’d spend two or three
weeks at a shot in Washington. I would come home every second or third weekend.
Some people put in more time that I did. I think I put in fourteen weeks. Some people
put in thirty weeks. So finally I went to Newton Corner, and we they moved to Hadley, I
had two years to get to age fifty-five, and I had thirty-one and a half years in. I did thirty-three
and a half years, and they were offering buyouts. I was commuting back home here
to my little sanctuary, which helped me keep my sanity. This is my refuge. If I didn’t
have this backyard to play in all the years I was working in the regional office it would
have been bad. But it got so that I was only getting home on weekends because it was
two hours each way. Now I am doing a lot of consulting. They are beating me up this
year. I am two months behind trip reports. I am doing wildlife and habitat assessment
type work for the National Park Service and the [unintelligible] Watershed Association
and the Great Bay Coalition are using my reports. Bob Miller is using them with the
Nature Conservancy. They are having me look at three and four hundred acre tracks that
have three hundred perk tests on them, and they are getting ready for development. So
that’s what I’m doing now. And Tom finally retired! I couldn’t believe that he would
ever retire. And he didn’t! Then he went to work for a contractor!
MR. GOETTEL: Did you really?
MR. GUVATIS: But he finally retired from that. I think you kind of retired before, and
kept going back.
MR. STUPPS: Yeah, I’d go back.
MR. GUVATIS: He loves running the equipment.
MR. STUPPS: It was a good job, but like anything else you get bored with it.
MR. GUVATIS: Bored?
MR. STUPPS: When you’re running that equipment all day, every day.
MR. GUVATIS: It wasn’t building dikes and farming.
MR. STUPPS: It was good though. I enjoyed it at first.
33
MR. GUVATIS: Tom has to be busy all of the time.
MR. STUPPS: Not anymore!
MR. GUVATIS: Are you enjoying relaxing a little more?
MR. STUPPS: Yep. I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to get home.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, O.K. Do you want to get your stuff?
MR. GUVATIS: Did you have some pictures to show? Do you want something to eat?
I can fix some sandwiches or something.
[pause]
MR. GOETTEL: We’re back again. Tommy Stupps has just left. He had to take off. So
it’s just George and me. George Gavutis and Tom Goettel are here. Tommy gave us a
picture of the Essex County Sportsman’s Club. And it says “notice, any persons
connected with the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service are not welcome on these grounds
of the Essex County Sportsman’s Association”. So I’m going to take a copy of that, and
send it down to NCTC. George started talking about how they literally, gave away of
Parker River.
MR. GUVATIS: Two thirds of it actually. Tom thought that is was around thirteen
thousand acres. I know that it was between ten and twenty thousand acres. A lot if it was
proclamation type waters, and condemnation type lands because the title was so clouded
as it was in so many areas, especially way back that it was the only way that they could
put a boundary together. That sign was on the Plum Island Turnpike near the airport on
Plum Island. Everybody that drove out to Plum Island would see that sign. [referring to
Mr. Stupps’ photo] The north end of the island is all houses, and the south end is refuge.
It was before my time there, as a student. It was even before Gordon Nightingale’s time I
believe, too. Maybe it was during Gordon Nightingale’s time. He may be able to shed
more light on that. There was a lot of hostility because the government came in there. A
Federal presence wasn’t relished by a lot of the sportsman’s groups. Even though there
was hunting on forty percent of the land at some point, maybe it wasn’t right off the bat.
I can’t remember, I don’t know the history of that business. But the refuge was a more
typical refuge. It went all the way from the sea at Plum Island with the beaches and
dunes and the back salt marshes, up the Parker River. That’s where it got its name.
“Parker River National Wildlife Refuge” doesn’t fit this refuge at all. Those Parker River
wetlands went on for miles, all the way up into Georgetown, Massachusetts several miles
west of route 95, into the Crane Pond area, and across route 95 into West Newbury. It
also includes the Artichoke Reservoir area. All of these State Wildlife Management areas
that exist there now, were a part of Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. I read the
bulk of the Congressional Record with was voluminous. The refuge probably still has a
copy of it. It was piled up on top of a cabinet. There were several think bindings full of
Congressional testimony and record. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen, as
part of the Refuge System. An area that could have been protected and preserved was
34
gone. At least it went to State Fish and Game departments. But it’s been totally
neglected as such, because they didn’t have the funding, or a national mission for it. The
wetlands are still drained, and over grazed or over pastured. They are still in relatively
poor condition, as far as wetland wildlife goes. Most of it’s has gone up in timber and
aren’t really managed much. If they are it is “put and take” pheasant hunting with two
sessions a day. That’s when three hundred hunters storm the place. They stock it twice a
day, and throw everybody out at noon, and then let another batch in. It’s just a kind of a
“zoo” kind of area. And the wetlands, like I said, are still mostly drained.
MR. GOETTEL: So they acquired the property in the 1930s? When did they first
acquire the land?
MR. GUVATIS: I would say it was the 1940s, but it could have been as early as the late
1930s. I think it was in 1944 as I recall. There are records that will tell you that. Gordon
Nightingale would probably know that.
MR. GOETTEL: What lead to the actual change?
MR. GUVATIS: There was a political uproar. It started with the sportsmen. When I
was there at Parker River, we were proposing a headquarters down on the island and
there were people that were in the Conservation Commission involved. There was a
judge in the area which includes the four towns that are part of the refuge, don’t quote me
on his name. He was in, I believe, Newbury. There is Newburyport, Newbury, Rowley,
and another. He went way back in this business. And his comment to me, as Refuge
Manager at the time, was that they were fighting a “stonewalling” action by us to put our
headquarters and facilities down on the island where we felt that it belonged so that we
could manage the refuge properly. He said, “We stopped you then and we’re going to
stop you now!” And this was said to me at a public meeting! Talk about being an
“obstructionist”! And talk about an “attitude” which I hadn’t even been aware of. I had
been working with people on the commissions that were more current people. But this
old guy was still there on that committee having his way with us. And as you know, we
never did built the facility down on the island. We had the BLSU money. We had the
design for it. We had the mitigation and everything we needed. We were going to tear
out goose pens, and restore dunes and do all kinds of things to buffer this thing and put it
on the backside of the barrier island. It was going to be right in the middle of the refuge,
what’s left of the refuge. Actually, Plum Island and the beach would have been a very
small and insignificant part of it. If we had held on to the fifteen or twenty thousand
acres, or what ever it was, that we had originally, it would have been more like a classic
refuge. It would have been similar to Montezuma or maybe even Great Meadows, but on
a much grander scale. This tract of a nuisance of a beach probably would have gone to
the State somehow. We would have swapped some land, or traded it, or accessed it,
because that was the least valuable property for our mission. It turns out now that the
beach now, is very important too. We ended up with a real controversial, public battle.
We fought with the public all the way to keep that open for picnicking and swimming and
having a great outside time on the shore. Unfortunately, that’s what has consumed the
refuge. And if you read the record, and having been involved with it as a student, and as
35
a manager as I was, and having been on refuges all over the country, and reading the
circulating narratives from all over the country, it’s a very unique case. It’s a case of a
refuge that almost was. They lost two thirds of that refuge! They gave it back to
landowners, and towns. They gave it to the State Fish and Game department, and
anybody that they could dump it on. They gave it back to them. In some cases, they
couldn’t even give it back to whoever claimed it because there was no clear title, so it
went to the State. And they have two people to manage eight thousand acres. And
horseback riders and mini-bikes very intensively use the land, whether legally or
illegally. It’s just not what it could have been. It could have been another great swamp
where you have tens of thousands of wood ducks being produced, and eggs being laid. It
could have been a tremendous woodcock area, or an early cessational habitat area. It had
a lot of fires. Even today it’s fairly scrubby growth, and the ground is very rocky in
places. It is also swampy in areas. There are a lot of good places for woodcock to feed
there. A lot of the uplands are “shrubby” and mushy. It has a pretty good Rough Grouse
population too. We would have had Rails, and waterfowl and a lot of migratory bird use
if it had been managed. Two thirds of is was wetland, and probably is still drained. In
some places the beaver have helped out. I remember reading the Congressional records
with the testimony of the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I also read the
testimony of the Director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and that of the mayors
of the various towns.
MR. GOETELL: How did “MASS” Audubon feel?
MR. GUVATIS: I can’t remember exactly. I think they supported us as I recall. But
there was the testimony of the Congressional people of the day. There were the Senators,
and Representatives from Massachusetts there also. But there were one or two important
political figures that were dead set against the refuge. The various groups that were
against it were cheering these figures on. It became almost like a crusade, a witch hunt
kind of a thing. It was reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. It was awful. The sad thing
is, it took away that heritage for the rest of us, forever. It’s gone! We’ll never see it
again. Parker River Refuge would have had an entirely different picture if it hadn’t
happened. What they ended up with was proclamation waters in an open bay, salt marsh,
and the barrier island beach, which was a nuisance for the most part. It sucked off
millions of dollars of refuge funds that could have gone it habitat and wildlife
management. This money went to controlling public use. If you look at the history of it
before Mr. Moses was there, and when I was there as a student with J.C. Apple, we had
picnic areas and tables with hibachis that we provided. There were lifeguards, and there
was trash collection, and all that stuff. It was a multi million-dollar operation practically
in those days. Today it would be. It didn’t cost that kind of money then. But that’s
where all of the energy for that refuge went. It drained all of the rest of the refuges in the
region, because Parker River always had this big problem. Slowly, Ed Moses and I
phased out some of it. I put up a sign that said, “Since there is trash collection, please
consider your exit fee to be one full bag of trash from the roads, dunes or beaches”, or
something like that. We took all of the barrels out. Ed Moses phased out the lifeguards
before I got there. I reduced the parking from fifteen cars to seven and oriented it around
nature trails. We tried to change the use from just pure beach recreation to bird watching
36
and things like that. The bird watchers had to compete with the beach users for parking
spaces. We tried to encourage fishing and other uses of the area. We put in boardwalks
and nature trails and stuff like that in place of the beach use. We cut way back on non-wildlife
use, through several managers. But the direction to go from the Land and Water
Recreation Fund, and the acts of Congress, was coming from Washington. The refuge
basically opened the door and said, “Please select Parker River when you open them.”
We created a real problem. There were people coming by the tens of thousands, by the
hundreds of thousands. There was at least a quarter, to a half a million visits when I was
there. Then slowly the composition changed, and it went down, down, down. The visits
now are probably around a couple hundred thousand.
MR. GOETTEL: The law enforcement component that you were talking about earlier, I
think that was an important part that was lost.
MR. GUVATIS: Really? There were three full time officers when I was there. Tony
Lejay was hired as Don Grover’s assistant. He was a full time law enforcement person
from Michigan. That’s how he got into the Fish and Wildlife Service.
MR. GOETTEL: You were saying that they had rapes, and “B and E” [breaking and
entering] rings there.
MR. GUVATIS: In one year, we broke five “B and E” rings. It was unbelievable! We
had hundreds and hundreds of cars that were broken into, and smashed. The windshields
would be smashed, and whatever valuables left in them, were stolen. People commonly
left their valuables, on a beach situation, with sand and salt water, in their vehicles. So it
was a perfect setup for these thugs. Every year we would clean them out and new ones
would start. There would be a rash of them. We would develop a “M.O” [modus
operandi] and go after them, and we would finally catch them. But it took a lot of effort
with the help of the local police. When I did my “6-C” write up for Parker River, it was
incredible compared to what most refuge managers would be able to put down. We had
State Deputy credentials. We had full Massachusetts State Police powers, as deputy
“CO”. That was the authority that came with that. We had that kind of capability. We
didn’t go arresting people out on the highways and everything. The State Police do that.
But we had the same authority as the State Police of Massachusetts, in addition to our
Federal credentials. We were running radar, and doing drug tests, and all of those
sophisticated police type stuff. There were hundreds of cases involving drugs ever year.
It was nothing to have a thousand cases in a year, and prosecute maybe five hundred.
When I did my “6-C” stuff that was the kind of thing that Don Grover was involved in.
There was a tremendous caseload, and it was dangerous.
MR. GOETTEL: Mr. Grover had a whole closet of weapons that he had taken away from
people. One time, I took away a hockey stick with a nail in it. There were pipes and
anything that you could imagine would be used as a weapon.
MR. GUVATIS: There were all kinds of drug paraphernalia that you couldn’t even
imagine, and weapons of all types. There were machetes and bayonets and pistols and
37
sawed off shotguns found. You name it, and it was there! We had some real harrowing
experiences down there, Grover, and Moses, and I. There was no back up for a while. It
was just Grover for a while, and then we got him an assistant. There were Tony Lejay,
and Chris Shotmeyer. Now Chris works for the Marine Fisheries. Billy Capulious was
his assistant for a while also. All of these people did law enforcement full time. We had
a pubic use specialist who for nine months of the year was basically a full time law
enforcement person. He did the brochures, and other things, but he did that too. And
then, there was me. I can’t remember what my estimates were, but it was probably
twenty-five to fifty percent during some of my tenure there. I got to a point where I
didn’t want to be in court all of the time. So whenever I could, I called in the full time
law enforcement people to handle the situations that I ran into. Then I would just in as a
witness if I had to. They would make the actual arrests. We made real arrests! We had
to handcuff people. We had people who were fighting us. We carried mace spray and
batons before the Service, before anybody! We were the police down there! It was very
easy to make a case. Down at Great Swamp we had a lot of trouble more trouble than
normal. There were problems there with vandalism, and drugs there. It wasn’t as bad as
it was at Parker River but people in this part of the country, that stayed on refuges in the
east, especially near the beaches were heavily into law enforcement, especially at Parker
River. The Agents were making cases, but they were slowly moving into more
investigative work. They were management enforcement agents. They were up there in
the summer “ banding” too. Our guy was on the beach busting up drunken parties and
drug orgies, and that kind of thing. The life threatening part of law enforcement was
much more real for Don Grover than it was for most Fish and Wildlife law enforcement
agents. Wally Ciroca really went after it. He got into some situations were there were
drugs and ivory and other things. And there was some undercover stuff as well. They
could have easily gotten killed doing that. Grover this kind of potential, you know how
dangerous car stops are at especially at night and alone. He had motorcycle gangs
surround him with chains and whips and everything else. Moses would arrive on the
scene from his residence up on the island, and the Police would roll in right after that.
All kinds of things could have happened. There were murders, and attempted murders
and rapes. There were a lot of rapes every year reported. And there were probably a lot
that were not reported. There were assaults, and all kinds of crazy stuff. Then we had
wildlife violations. People would steal goose broods and put them in the back of their hot
station wagon to roast. I have pictures in one of my narrative reports of goslings in the
back of a station wagon. There was a lot of drug stuff. You would smell marijuana, or
see paraphernalia at the gate, or on a routine stop for speeding. We were all trained radar
operators. I took a Doppler radar course. We had a guy come up and teach us how to do
it. We had people who were driving sixty or seventy miles an hour who said it was the
best way to get over. You could just touch the tops of the hills! You can just imagine the
cloud of dirt and gravel that they would spew out. Not only was it bad for the
environment because of the gravel drifting out over the marsh, and it had to be replaced.
Gravel is a non-renewable resource. There would be people run off of the road. There
would be hit and run incidents. We had everything! If you read my “6-C” file you would
see all this stuff in there, and it not made up! It’s true! Moses’ and Grover’s were the
same way.
38
MR. GOETTEL: It’s funny, because when I worked at Great Meadows people used to
talk about going to Plum Island. I’d say, “Do you mean Parker River?” they would say
“No, we’re going to Plum Island”.
MR. GUVATIS: They called in the “Park” at Plum Island. They didn’t even know what
was there. They would call it “the wildlife”. They never knew what it was. We had
signs everywhere, and uniforms. We are always “the Rangers”. We had to get air
conditioning for our guys. They would be down on the beach, these “greenheads” and
they would be trying to maintain composure in ninety to one hundred degree heat! They
had to deal with violations. And they are being chewed out because they had the
windows rolled down in those dark green pickups that were like a Venus flytrap. It was
interesting.
MR. GOETTEL: You were talking about Jay Clark Salyer going through New Jersey.
MR. GUVATIS: Jay Clark Salyer went to all of these refuges.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, I know. Did he do Parker River too?
MR. GUVATIS: My understanding was that he hand picked, and selected all of these
places himself. It was him and Ding Darling, and maybe other people too. It was such a
small outfit then, that everybody knew each other, and they all reported directly to Salyer.
Salyer drove all over the country so I am sure that he was at Parker River. I heard that in
New Jersey he looked at Great Peace, Meadows, Troy Meadows and Great Swamp. All
of this was glacial lake, Passaic, or the basin. He, or somebody with him made the
comment that they felt that Great Swamp was the least desirable. Mainly because it has
more upland dispersed in it. And it had been more subject to settlement and because it
wasn’t all pure wetland. Where as Great Peace was kind of in between, and Troy
Meadows was mostly deep, freshwater marsh, when restored. It was all deep cattail
marsh and it was probably loaded with Rails, and Least Bitterns, and Pied-billed Grebes,
and Moorhens, and all of the threatened species you have now in New Jersey and New
England. They were all there on their own. Although they had made attempts at
drainage, it took very little restoration, if any to see the wildlife values of those places.
But looking at Great Swamp, it was a bunch of farms, woodlots, and wet fields. They
bedded all of the fields down there. I see it everywhere I go now I put it in all of my
reports. They plowed year after year after year, from the same spot, into the middle and
then they would come around to the other side. Plowing with a land plow formed those
ditches. They’ll start plowing to the right, and they’ll throw everything to the right, and
the last furrow that was left was a ditch. They kept doing this every year. If it were very
wet, they would do it every fifteen or twenty feet. On the raised areas, or mounds, they
would plant. Every one of these little beds ends up being a swale. It had vegetation and
water standing in it. Usually it’s done on clay soils. I found a lot of that on Faletts’s
Brook that flows into Langford River and into the Great Bay estuary system. Then it
reverts into brush as they abandon it and it’s hard to even detect it in the woods. There
are trees and logs that have fallen across it. But basically it is still there. That’s what
they did at Great Swamp. It just like New England, it was cleared. It was grassland, and
39
wet grass and tall meadow hay. Great Meadows has at least two or three hundred acres
of continuous wetland, maybe four of five hundreds. Real wetlands, with buttonbush and
deep, fresh water marsh, were there. There were a lot of marginal areas where one or two
inches of relief would make the difference between a hickory tree or a gum tree or a
buttonbush plant. The relief was that much. It’s so flat. It was like the Everglades as far
as the system, when it was all plugged up and restored it was sheet water, in some places
a half a mile, or a mile wide. It would just weave through the area, and it slows it down.
Going through the saw grass in the Everglades is just like going through the cattails and
other stuff here. It impedes the flow, and holds the water level up as long as it rains
every few weeks. Then, if you put some dikes or dams like we did at Great Swamp, in
addition, to regulate it even further. It’s incredible how much water you get there. You
would get a puddle on your front lawn because its clay. And if it rains a lot and the water
stands you can get mosquitoes hatching out of it. This could happen in a deer hoof print,
or a heal print! So Great Swamp ended up being quite a good selection as a refuge. The
region has apparently been on the defensive before my time, before I got there. Dick
Rigby was the first manager there. Then Tom McAndrews was there briefly as an
assistant. Tom came from an education background. He had come from a school. He
was a schoolteacher kind of guy. He probably had a biology degree. They were trying to
get anybody they could to go there. I was very offended when they asked me to go there
because it had a kind of a reputation. It was like the beach at Parker River. I got into this
for wildlife management, not people management! And not to do all this draining of
wetlands. And Great Swamp was full of homesteads. There were hundreds and hundreds
of homesteads that we basically acquired one way or the other. When the wilderness
came on, there was a big push to clean up all of these homesteads, and rip out the roads
and plug the ditches and pull out all of the pipes. They wanted to dam up all of the
ditches too. We did it, and what a wonderful thing it was for a while. We made it kind a
jewel. I think Salyer by that time was long dead. But people said that Salyer would
reconsider if he sees it as it was today.
MR. GOETTEL: The other ones that you mentioned, like Troy Meadows, have they
been protected at all?
MR. GUVATIS: They were all protected. In fact, we had Ralph Andrews, he’s another
one that you could talk to. He was at Patuxent, and was the manager at Troy Meadows.
It was maybe a federal entity then, I think it was one of those areas that we had dual
control over. Ralph Andrews could probably tell you more about it. It was actually a
satellite, or small refuge for a while under some written agreement, I don’t know what.
Or it could have been that it was signed over the Service to another agency. I know that
Wild Preserves, Inc., a private group, bought most of Troy Meadows, and a good bit of
Great Peace Meadows. They didn’t have the funding that a federal agency could have
brought into it. The condemnation potential to round out the acquisition, even if the title
was parleyed, they couldn’t go to court and condemn. Even if nobody knew who owned
it, they couldn’t get it. Then they turned around, and became our enemy up at Great
Swamp because people were donating land, or they bought it for a pittance, this Wildlife
Preserves, Inc. Miller could fill you in on that story because he was a realty officer. We
were then blackballed by Wildlife Preserves, Inc. because they wanted one hundred
40
thousand dollars for a piece of land that they got for nothing which was suppose to go to
us in the first place. But the people didn’t realize that we were not all the same, so they
deeded it to them. They ended up with two thousand acres of Great Swamp. Some of it
we condemned, and some of it we just did without. It was a shame, that’s kind of another
area where we didn’t get what we should have gotten. Although I think that slowly we
have gotten most of it. Some of it may have been sold for a subdivision and that kind of
thing. But that’s another story where the Refuge System didn’t get its due. Most refuges
were pretty clear-cut, and clean. We had some real tragedies in this region. Parker River
is the one that comes to mind the most. We actually had it in our hot little hands for a
decade, and then it got axed. They wrote it out, and gave it back to the Indians and the
State, and whoever else claimed it. They put us down in a little cubbyhole.
MR. GOETTEL: I heard that they did that at Monomoy too, with Morris Island.
MR. GUVATIS: Did they?
MR. GOETTEL: It wasn’t Monomoy itself, but Morris Island.
MR. GUVATIS: Maybe it was a trend in Massachusetts at the time. A precedent was
established somewhere. It was probably in Massachusetts mostly, and maybe a little bit
in New Jersey too. All those of those other wetlands that I mentioned north of Great
Swamp, are part of the Glacier Lake Passaic, which is like twenty-five miles long and
was a big glacier lake. They all have clay bottoms, and deep muck, and peat and soils
overlaying. They have a lot of water, and a lot of wetlands with poor drainage. I could
still and talk at length about all this stuff. But there is a lot of history in those narrative
reports. And as the Wildlife Manager at Great Swamp, I have several of the narratives
that were written. They were kind of legends in their own time, because they were
written in the 1970s and late 1960s. We were the first ones to put color photography into
them. Some people thought that this was inappropriate, and that it was all supposed to be
in black and white. They said that it shouldn’t look like a magazine. It should look like a
dull, dry paper. I got letters from Noble Buell who was the assistant Director saying that
he wanted to congratulate you people from Region five, and thank the Refuge Manager
for providing a readable document that was interesting. It had a little bit of humor here
and there, and there was photography all though it, illustrating the ditch plug, and the
wetland restoration, or the deer-poaching problem. It was like National Geographic
magazine, almost! Some of the pictures we had were really good! I used to carry a three
hundred, and a four hundred millimeter camera in my suitcase in the car. And in between
my residence on the refuge and the office, I would get incredible photo opportunities
about once a month along the side of the road. Maybe there would be a short-eared owl
that was very tame, or a big buck standing there because he was crazy for the rut. I used
to walk the nature trails, and we had observation blinds. At the residence at the refuge,
right out of the window, we saw the first Yellow-headed Blackbird, the first one in New
Jersey in sixty years! He was sitting at the bird feeder in the cherry tree. We could get
pictures like that without a lot of effort, and we would put them in the narrative. One of
our assistants did a thing on Monarchs, and showed the chrysalis, and the egg, and the
larvae and the pupae. We had pictures of Monarch on Asters. When were getting RBUs,
41
we had a RBU for every Monarch butterfly, and we had millions of them. We were the
most valuable refuge in the country! [laughing] That was in the old PPBE days, when
we went through all of these budgetary things.
MR. GOETTEL: I was up at Moosehorn then, and we put down clams, you know.
Somebody made us stop doing that. The worst part about the clams though was that there
were two reasons why they should be in it. First of all, there were a lot of clam diggers.
That was a big thing in ‘down east” Maine, and still is today. The other thing is that all
of the Eiders would come in there, and the Sea Ducks too. And what do they eat? They
eat the clams and mussels and things like that. So this was probably one of the things
that you should include.
MR. GUVATIS: We all got caught up in that. I think that most of us bought into it. It
ate us up for like a year or two. It was just like the “sick sea” thing we just went through
last winter putting that back together from ancient history. But yeah, we did have some
interesting times on these refuges. No doubt about it! I was only at Great Swamp for
like five years. When I moved there from Iroquois, we did a “first”. There was a refuge
house at Iroquois my position and McAndrews’ position occupied. He was at Great
Swamp as acting Manager in the Refuge Manager’s house, and I was in the assistant
Manager’s house at Iroquois, and we swapped. The mover said that he would never do it
again. But he packed us up at Iroquois, and drove us down. Then they had to pack up all
of McAndrews’ stuff and get it out before they could move us in. And they still had to
turn around and go back with McAndrews’ stuff. We swapped houses. That was a first,
I think. We all worked for “Smitty”. If you didn’t work for Larry Smith in those days,
when Moses, McAndrews, and I were coming up through the ranks. You had to work for
Larry Smith before you could get your own station. Before you really went anywhere.
You were nobody until you worked for Larry Smith. He was the premier refuge manager
in the region according to Tom Horne who was the supervisor. He thought the world of
Larry Smith. “Smitty” was a very thorough and detailed person. He has impeccable
records on everything. He was quite a filmmaker too. He made these night-lighting
films, and some others also. He didn’t make the ones from Great Swamp, but he did the
one at Montezuma and Iroquois. We used to have all of this dead timber there, and we
used to go up and put up these chicken wire baskets, hummock nests we called them. We
would nail them into the crotches of the timber on the ice. We would put up these
“chicken baskets” and fill them with hay. And Mallards and Black ducks used an
incredible number of them. And even Red Heads used them. Even Pintails would use
them. But then the raccoons would catch on. We also had a toxic egg program. We used
to take eggs for free from the Pheasant farm at Iroquois. There was this little drill similar
to what a Dentist would have. You would cut out a little flap on the egg. And then drop
a strychnine pellet in each one, and wax it over with a candle. We would put two or three
in a clutch. It was very selective, out over the water. The only thing we ever got with it
was a raccoon, or maybe a mink. That was a way that we did predator control. It
actually improved the waterfowl population as a result. But those are days that are gone
forever. I can remember another situation when we had the same kind of eggs at Parker
River, and the biologist used them. Some of this you may not want to use, but it is
interesting. It shows the environmental impact we might have had in some cases. When
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the word came out that agent orange was bad, that it had dioxin in it, it got buried in
plastic bags in some cases. Maps were drawn to show where it was. The Biologist at
Parker River took the strychnine that we had. We decided that the toxic egg thing was
something that we shouldn’t be doing anymore because an eagle got killed somewhere.
He took it down to the beach, of the Atlantic Ocean and “cast it upon the waters”,
thinking that the dilution would be incredible, and it would be gone. About three hours
later a message came on the radio, “There’s dead Sanderlings all over the place”!
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GUVATIS: And this guy was really sensitive. He was so upset. He almost died of
a heart attack when he heard this! What it had done was to get into the shrimp, and the
stuff at the tide line. The little shrimp, and the copepods and all that stuff had ingested it
and the Sanderlings ate them and boom. It just goes to show you that when you create
these toxins and don’t realize what they can do, it can be bad. Nobody intended anything
bad to happen as a result of it but I’m sure that a lot of it happened. Every refuge had it’s
own dynamite shed. It was basically a pillbox in the ground, lined with cement. You
kept dynamite in there, which changes composition and create more and more
nitroglycerin. It gets every unstable, and that’s kind of what we had on every refuge.
MR. GOETTEL: Up at Moosehorn they would get it from Georgia Pacific. And I don’t
know what Georgia Pacific was doing with it.
MR. GUVATIS: They probably used it to blow log jams on the rivers when they were
doing river drives of timber.
MR. GOETTEL: They would keep it through the expiration date and then give it to the
game wardens and the wildlife preserves.
MR. GUVATIS: Maybe they thought we could blow up beaver dams with it! We used it
to blast ditches with it, and potholes. But ammonium nitrate was far more effective.
When the military seized upon it, they called it a “cratering charge”. They used it to
destroy airfields or landing strips that we were either abandoning during the war, or that
we wanted to destroy so that the enemy couldn’t use them. You could just fill it full of
twenty-five foot wide, eight-foot deep craters. It would neutralize anyone’s ability to
land a plane on it. We just took it from there, and used our own ammonium nitrate
fertilizer and fuel oil in bags with a blasting cap in it. You had a hell of a lethal explosive
that you could make nice round holes in the march with. Every one of them was a
breeding pair habitat site. It was great! And if you ever drained the areas, you had
reservoirs for fish and stuff if you wanted them. If you didn’t, you still had them. If carp
got in there, you’d never get rid of them unless you treated every hole. Would you like a
drink or something to eat? I must be getting hungry.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a glass of water or something. That would be
great.
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MR GUVATIS: [voice fades as he walks away] I’ve got lemonade and grape mix or
something like that. I also have milk, and ice water. . .